Agentic AI has rapidly evolved from a future-looking aspiration into a present-day imperative. Organizations are quickly moving from experimentation to production. IDC projects that agentic AI will account for $1.3 trillion in IT spending by 2029.
This represents a fundamental shift in how businesses operate, moving beyond automating static tasks to enabling dynamic, multi-agent networks that execute complex business processes. Without a clear strategy, organizations rush to deploy, resulting in a new generation of unmanageable and ungoverned agent sprawl.
Trends shaping the new agentic era in 2026
The MuleSoft 2026 Agentic Trends Report outlines six key trends shaping this new era. The central, unavoidable conclusion? You can’t have a successful agentic enterprise without a robust, API-led integration and governance strategy. Here’s a look at the interconnected challenges and opportunities highlighted in the report.
From static workflows to dynamic networks
For years, automation meant predictable, rules-based workflows or RPA. Agentic AI shatters this model. We’re now building multi-agent ecosystems where specialized agents collaborate to solve problems too complex for any single agent.
This is the shift from static workflows to dynamic networks (Trend 1). This shift complements existing static workflows. Agents will dynamically reason and invoke these workflows where appropriate. Many core processes remain standardized and must be auditable, making reliable, pre-defined workflows the perfect tool for an intelligent agent to use.
The problem is that this creates an immediate and pressing need for orchestration and governance (Trend 2). Without a central management plane to coordinate and monitor these actors, organizations will face a chaotic digital environment.
How do you observe agent behavior? How do you trace their decisions? And most critically, how do you secure a network of internally and externally developed autonomous actors, the very agents now executing core business functions?
Why most AI is still just “conversational”
Many organizations are stuck in the “conversational” phase of AI, using it as a sophisticated chatbot. The real value is unlocked when AI becomes actionable – when it can “resolve a customer’s issue” or “process a grant application” autonomously.
This is where APIs become the star of the show. Agent actionability is driving the next wave of API management (Trend 3). For an agent to become actionable, it must first discover what actions are possible. APIs are the “glue” and the catalog of capabilities that connect agents to the broader enterprise ecosystem. They’re the tools an agent can discover and use to move from recommending an action to executing it.
This API-led connectivity is what elevates AI agents from conversational assistants to capable actors. It directly impacts the ability to demonstrate ROI (Trend 4) because value is measured by tangible outcomes, a metric that prioritizes executable actions over simple conversations.
This value is impossible to create without trustworthy data. APIs are the connective tissue that not only connect agents to actions, but also to the correct, governed data sources, ensuring that an agent’s reasoning is based on the right information.
API security is agent security
The very thing that makes agents powerful also makes them a significant risk. The report highlights a critical vulnerability: an autonomous agent will discover and act on any accessible API that is suitable for its intent.
If that API is unsecured, a rogue or compromised agent can amplify that vulnerability at machine speed (Trend 5). This moves a potential vulnerability from a single, containable incident to an automated, large-scale security crisis.
This is why agent governance is ultimately a form of API governance. This is especially true in the multi-vendor, multi-cloud reality every CIO faces. Your agents from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and your own development teams all need to securely access each other and the same on-prem and cloud-native systems. This API-led approach is also the only scalable way to safely expose your critical – but fragile – legacy systems to this new agentic workforce.
| You can’t govern an autonomous agent directly. You can only govern what it has permission to connect to and do. And governance is impossible without observability – you can’t control what you can’t see. |
Effective governance focuses on the agent’s connections as the practical point of control for its behavior. An API gateway becomes the enterprise policy framework for the entire agent network, serving as the mechanism to observe, inspect, and manage every agent-to-agent and agent-to-system interaction while applying consistent zero-trust policies.
From prompt to prototype
When you have a secure, governed, and well-documented network of APIs, you unlock the ultimate promise of agentic AI: accelerating composability (Trend 6).
This means AI agents become active participants in the development of new composable applications, expanding their role beyond being mere users. This acceleration applies to building any new application, whether it’s a traditional application or a new agentic service. This is critical because it radically compresses the time from business idea to functional code, allowing developers to iterate at an unprecedented speed.
With an API-led foundation, an AI agent can understand a developer’s prompt, discover the necessary business capabilities (exposed as APIs), and assemble a working prototype in seconds. This ‘prompt to prototype’ capability is a practical reality, grounded in the hard work of creating a curated, well-documented catalog of APIs that agents can find and understand.
This is precisely what an API-led strategy is designed to create. It’s the ultimate expression of the composable enterprise, turning intent directly into working applications.
Your foundation is what matters
The agentic enterprise is here, and it will be built on the foundation of API-led connectivity. Success will be determined by the ability to build a foundation that allows you to centrally orchestrate agentic workflows, securely govern all interactions, clearly observe behavior and outcomes, and enable agents to easily discover the business capabilities they need.
Read the full 2026 Agentic Trends Report to get the complete picture, and start evaluating how your integration strategy will support the agentic enterprise. This foundation can be built iteratively. It begins by identifying a critical business capability, wrapping it in a governed API, and allowing your first agent to use it.
