3 Steps to Winning in the Agentic Era

Today’s leaders are under huge pressure to deliver on the promise of AI. How do they lay the foundation for an AI-powered future?

Businesses deploying generative AI experienced a rush of investment and exciting new pockets of enhanced productivity. Many approached AI by appointing an “AI saviour” – a lone executive tasked with fixing the business with the technology. Meanwhile, individual teams across the enterprise built isolated solutions to solve department-level problems.

But the next stage requires more than just plugging a large language model (LLM) into existing operations. As AI agents – autonomous systems that analyse, reason, and take action – are added to the workforce, leaders must become architects of the agentic era.

So, what does that look like in practice?

Executives recently gathered at MuleSoft Connect:AI in London to find out.

The organisations leading Agentic AI implementation shared their strategies for turning fragmented systems and use cases into a high-performing agentic enterprise. Here are three steps to winning the agentic era, based on discussions from the day.

1. Become open by design

The first mistake many organisations make is treating AI agents like just another layer in the tech stack. AI agents represent a paradigm shift for the workplace, and they’re fundamentally different from the deterministic software of yesteryear. For example:

• Software does what it’s told; AI agents make autonomous decisions.
• Software fails the same way twice; AI agents can behave in unpredictable ways.
• Software scales by copying; AI agents scale by learning.

Because AI agents are so dynamic, business architecture must be made future-proof. Just a few years ago, the agentic enterprise was barely a twinkle in the eye of Silicon Valley’s AI engineers – let alone a key milestone appearing on most C-suite roadmaps. You have to build with the future in mind when a breakthrough technology comes to market.

That means transitioning to an interoperable, open development model that brings all your investments in AI, APIs, and integrations into the future. 

The challenge for organisations is the governance quagmire this creates: managing dozens of different gateways, each with its own console and controls. Businesses must prepare for the AI age by auditing their highest-value APIs and ensuring they’re agent-ready.

MuleSoft is solving the problem with MCP Bridge, exposing existing REST APIs to agents in just a few clicks – and enabling them to carry over comprehensive governance and security policies without any coding.

We’re also launching API Federation to provide a single console to manage every vendor’s gateway. Bringing APIs together prepares your architecture for the agentic era; the platform ensures your data is clean and trustworthy with unified governance of API and AI assets built in.

Open design in action: AAH Pharmaceuticals

Leading health product distributor AAH Pharmaceuticals wanted to deliver a frictionless environment for customers and suppliers. It used Salesforce to build a 360-degree view of its customers, supported by MuleSoft as the secure API layer linking front and back-end processes.

The company now routes more than 99% of all customer interactions – from WhatsApp messages to call centre communications – through a governed suite of APIs to control information flow.

Frictionless architecture has helped AAH Pharmaceuticals deliver superior experiences, a 70-80% increase in digital revenue, and scale Agentic AI. The team now uses AI agents to handle repeatable customer service activities, including order tracking, reviewing purchase history, and managing returns, freeing employees to focus on higher-value tasks.

AAH Pharmaceuticals is a change agent in its industry – proving that AI-enhanced automation is possible in a highly regulated environment.

2. Engineer for trust

Interoperability is a critical part of the agentic era, but it comes with risk. Leaders must consider how they can engineer their architecture to prioritise trust.

Without a well-governed foundation to build the agentic enterprise on, development teams will chase their tails – constantly auditing for AI privacy and safety without the confidence to scale new use cases.

It’s already taking a toll. According to S&P Global, nearly half (42%) of companies abandon most of their AI initiatives before they reach the production stage.

AI governance shouldn’t be a handbrake – it should be an accelerator. When you embed trust into your data foundation, individual business units feel empowered to move quickly and experiment.

They find the use cases that deliver enterprise-wide AI benefits. Rapid decision-making. More detailed customer insights. Multi-step automations that free human workers to focus on strategic value. Good governance makes your Agentic AI strategy scalable.

MuleSoft Agent Fabric offers a single control plane to monitor and secure your agent network. You can instantly discover and catalogue agents and tools built anywhere – from Agentforce or third parties. Here’s how it works:

• Discover: Use the Agent Registry and Agent Scanner to surface AI agents across your entire ecosystem.
• Govern: Apply consistent security policies to every agent, tool, and model via AI Gateway and Trusted Agent Identity.
• Orchestrate: Use Agent Broker to conduct multi-step processes across platforms and tools.
• Observe: Gain unparalleled visibility into every output and the chain of events that led to an agent’s action with Agent Visualiser.

If you want to test your current risk level, run an “error simulation.” If one of your AI agents made a mistake right now, how long would it take you to find and fix it? If the answer is “too long,” it’s time to engineer for trust.

Capita is delivering cross-platform governance to scale AI

Capita faced a classic dilemma for businesses in the agentic era: a fragmented digital landscape where hyperscaler AI tools provided useful functionality, but lacked a cohesive, multi-platform governance layer that would allow them to build safely. The board demanded a central hub to prevent ungoverned agent sprawl.

By partnering with MuleSoft to anchor their agentic architecture, Capita turned governance into a competitive advantage. MuleSoft Agent Fabric enabled the team to reuse policies and standardise resourcing across the entire build platform – so employees could innovate without compromising security. 

Agent Fabric multiplied the value of AI within Capita. In just six months, the team deployed more than 400 AI agents to support client projects in pensions and health assessments, as well as internal procurement, project management, and learning and development.

3. Deliver at a high velocity

You have to move at the pace of the market to stay competitive. That means empowering every builder – from your dev team to business users – to deliver at high velocity. For example, MuleSoft Vibes is enabling non-technical users to scaffold AI and automate development processes through simple, natural language prompts.

You also need to meet your developers in the flow of work. We’re launching MuleSoft Anywhere to support teams building directly within the apps they already use, like Slack and Claude. This headless approach lets users scan across assets, apply governance policies, and monitor compliance without leaving their everyday productivity tools.

Empowering developers doesn’t mean bypassing IT, however. With the governance layer in place, true agility comes when IT provides the infrastructure and guardrails for dev teams to select the best-fit tools for their AI projects without compromising security.

It’s about equipping people to do their best work. To assess where your untapped AI value is lurking, try to find one task where AI agents could support your developers – in workflows from code generation and quality validation to modelling the development lifecycle. There’s opportunity everywhere.

The key to winning in the agentic era

Leaders at Connect:AI London told us that winning in the agentic era isn’t about who has the most agents – it’s about who has the best foundation.

By becoming open by design, engineering for trust, and equipping the workforce to deliver at high velocity, you move from a fragmented landscape to a harmonised and high-performing agentic enterprise.

Find out how MuleSoft can help architect your agentic enterprise or explore upcoming Salesforce events.