What’s the first thing you do when starting a project? You likely make a plan, determine what tools and supplies you need, and then begin. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to start before you have what you’ll need to complete everything.
For example, if you’re doing a home improvement project, you probably go to the hardware store. If you’re cooking a meal, you probably have to go get the ingredients you need. To successfully do what you’re setting out to do, you need to go and gather those supplies from wherever they are.
When it comes to AI and autonomous agents in a business, we see the same problem. For an AI to take meaningful action, it needs to know what it needs, and where to get it. Just like a hardware store has a catalog of tools and supplies for home improvement, or a grocery store has a catalog of ingredients to make a meal, a business needs some sort of catalog of business tooling to successfully accomplish whatever task it’s being asked to do.
Sharing Tools with Anypoint Exchange
At MuleSoft, we’ve been providing an asset catalog for years with Anypoint Exchange. Traditionally, Exchange has been a place where users cataloged their business applications, from REST and Async APIs to RPA Bots and Governance rulesets.
Exchange has provided a place where a developer could search for an application, read the documentation to determine what that app does, and then implement additional functionality on top of existing work without having to rebuild everything from scratch. For years, Exchange has provided a catalog of project supplies for business developers.
In the modern era of AI and autonomous agents, Exchange can still provide that functionality for AI. Today, AI Agents can read API documentation. They can comb through pages of documentation in seconds, and easily determine how to access data, and what they need to do to accomplish their task. As businesses look to pivot towards autonomous agents, providing those agents with an easy to access catalog will be of the utmost importance.
AI Agents and Exchange: 3 things you need
So how do we best catalog our tooling for an AI agent? How do we provide an agent access to this information? How do we write and organize our documentation for an AI agent?
1. Documentation
The first thing AI needs is clear, concise documentation on what an asset does. While an image might be useful for a human, and some AI can read images effectively, a simple sentence or two describing the function of an API route or RPA Bot is perfectly effective.
Within Exchange, you can document your APIs route by route, and describe what each one does. You can document your RPA Bots, describe the task they perform and what system they work on. With our relatively recent addition of Async API design and documentation support, you can document your event driven tooling to power use cases like Dynamic Pricing or Real-time Recommendations.
All of this can be easily written in documentation that is both human and machine readable. Just like the hardware store provides you a catalog of tools and supplies, this documentation gives your AI Agents a catalog of tools and supplies that it needs to do its job.
2. Location
The second thing an Agent needs is a location where it can go to perform the task. Within Exchange, you have the ability to document API endpoints, whether managed through UAPIM or unmanaged, so that your Agent can easily access target systems. Exchange provides a simple way for your agents to request access to tooling credentials, and allows you to easily control that access by combining Exchange with tools like API Manager or Governance.
3. Information
The last thing the Agent needs is a consistent, simple way to access all of this information. Fortunately, Exchange is built on top of our robust Platform APIs that allow you to easily connect your agents to Exchange.
Don’t want to build your own agents, but still want to leverage the power of AI and MuleSoft together? You can leverage Exchange assets with MuleSoft Actions for Einstein Copilot, giving the powerful Copilot models access to everything you’ve cataloged so that it can retrieve data and take action within your business.
Gather your tools and start building
The hardware store isn’t going to do your home improvement job for you. You will still have to gather the tools and supplies from the store, but if it weren’t for the hardware store you wouldn’t be able to gather those tools and supplies. In the same way, Exchange provides AI agents with an easy-to-access list of tools and resources within your organization.
Ensure your company is AI ready and get started with Anypoint Platform today!
