Behind the build: Why agentic architectures matter

By Anees Merchant, EVP (Global Head of Innovation, IP and Analytics Consulting), C5i

Most conversations about agentic AI focus on what agents can do. In enterprise environments it is more important to know what organisations are willing to let them do. Naturally, there is some hesitation as autonomy is moving closer to regulated processes, core systems and high-stakes decisions. Intelligence is not the only concern here. It is about whether context will hold, rules will be followed, and whether outcomes can be trusted at scale. The hesitation is not due to the lack of ambition or technology; it because of an architectural gap.

Moving from Models to Operating Systems
The last three years of AI progress centred on model capabilities such as better reasoning, longer context windows and multimodal understanding that created new possibilities. However, these advances also revealed a constraint that model improvements alone cannot solve ...