Doug Shannon is a global leader in digital transformation, specializing in AI, GenAI and intelligent automation.
Enterprises are racing to deploy AI in the front office. Leaders chase visible wins, sales acceleration, marketing optimization and customer service automation. These use cases are measurable, and they dominate the narrative.
Yet the back office is being overlooked again. That is a critical mistake, because the back office houses the systems, data and governance that determine whether AI projects succeed or fail. Without it, front-office innovation collapses into fragmented agents, disconnected processes and lost trust.
The missing link is the enterprise agent. Positioned in the back office, it is not another assistant or an orchestrator of orchestrators. It is the governed connector between your enterprise and the specialized platform agents you already use. Salesforce, ServiceNow, ERP, HR and finance platforms all create their own agents. The enterprise agent ensures your employees do not have to manage five or 10 separate assistants. Instead, those vendor agents connect once, through the enterprise agent, into your orchestrator layer, delivering trusted access downstream.
Governance At The Connection Layer
The value of an enterprise agent lies in governing external agent connections. APIs can connect systems and track usage, but they do not enforce governance. They cannot on their own apply RBAC, token rules or enterprise compliance policies.
There are two approaches that stand out:
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Access tied to enterprise roles, ensuring people only see and use the agent capabilities they need.
• Token-Gated Governance: Access wrapped in tokens that are issued, time-bound and auditable. Tokens act as keys that show who used which agent, when and for what purpose.
These models ensure every agent-to-agent interaction is secure, compliant and trackable. Enterprises can integrate vendor agents without surrendering control.
Let’s look at Salesforce and ServiceNow as an example.
Imagine your sales team depends on Salesforce’s lead prediction agent, while IT runs ServiceNow’s automation agent. Both are valuable but unmanaged, and they create exposure. Sales could accidentally access IT incident data, or IT could see sensitive customer pipeline details.
An enterprise agent solves this. It mediates the connections, enforces governance and ensures each downstream team receives only what they need. Sales ops gets clean lead insights from Salesforce, IT handles incidents through ServiceNow and neither crosses boundaries. RBAC or token-gated governance provides the accountability, while orchestration ensures both agents contribute without forcing employees to bounce between tools.
How To Get Started
• Map Dependencies: Inventory vendor agents across departments. Identify where people switch tools or duplicate work.
• Define Governance: Decide whether RBAC, token-gating or a hybrid approach best aligns with compliance and risk needs.
• Centralize Connections: Require all vendor agents to connect at the orchestrator layer through enterprise agents, not directly to end users.
• Pilot A Cross-Platform Workflow: Start with a process spanning two major platforms, prove the governance model, then expand.
• Scale With Control: As new agents emerge, plug them into the governed layer rather than letting downstream teams adopt them piecemeal.
Pitfalls To Avoid
• APIs Do Not Equal Governance: APIs wire systems together, but they do not enforce enterprise-grade controls like RBAC or token-gated access.
• Vendor Lock-In: Allowing vendor agents to dictate workflows puts your enterprise at risk. The enterprise agent ensures you control how external agents are used.
• Multiple Orchestrators And Fragmented Automation: If every department builds its own orchestration layer, enterprises end up with duplication, inconsistency and governance gaps. A single orchestrator layer, connected through enterprise agents, avoids this trap.
These pitfalls give light and insight into why many AI projects seem to be failing today. The real failure comes from trying to fit agents and orchestration into existing hierarchical structures and business mappings. Enterprises are still pushing agents into the same rigid trees of systems, processes and organizational design. Enterprise agents solve this by defining and governing your sources of truth at the back office, then enabling controlled access downstream where the value is realized.
The Takeaway
The front office may grab attention, but the back office decides whether AI delivers value. The enterprise agent is the missing connector, governing how vendor agents plug into your enterprise, applying RBAC or token-gated governance and ensuring data flows downstream in a controlled, auditable way.
Enterprises that ignore this risk face fragmented automation and failed projects. Enterprises that embrace it will build the foundation for a scalable, governed and resilient AI ecosystem.
Agents are ready, enterprises are failing, the difference is back-office orchestration and the enterprise agent is how to get it right.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
