The agentic era is here, and it's exposing a critical gap in enterprise infrastructure.
AI agents are no longer experimental. As many as 9 out of 10 enterprise organizations are actively adopting AI agents. Agents are making autonomous decisions, orchestrating complex workflows, and interacting with dozens of services in real time. But most enterprises are trying to support this new paradigm with infrastructure designed for a different era: fragmented tools, siloed governance, and manual processes that can't scale.
What's needed is a new kind of platform: one purpose-built for the demands of agentic AI. Not another point solution. A comprehensive developer platform that treats AI workloads as first-class citizens alongside traditional APIs and event-driven architectures.
After working with hundreds of enterprises navigating this transition, we've identified five essential pillars that define a modern Agentic AI Developer Platform: Build, Run, Discover, Govern, and Monetize.
The first pillar is enablement. Developers need tools that reduce friction when building AI-powered applications and agents. This means providing:
The goal isn't to replace existing development workflows but to extend them. Developers should be able to build agents using familiar paradigms while the platform handles the complexity of multi-model orchestration, tool calling, and context management.
Speed matters here. Teams that can iterate quickly on agent behaviors will outpace competitors still wrestling with boilerplate infrastructure code.
In practice: A developer building a customer service agent starts in their local environment with an API design tool like Kong Insomnia, testing MCP connections to backend systems — order management, inventory, shipping providers. They use pre-built connectors to expose these systems as agent-callable tools, define the agent's available actions through a standardized spec, and validate the full interaction loop locally before pushing to staging. The workflow mirrors traditional API development, but extended for agent-native patterns: tool definitions, context windows, and multi-turn conversation handling are all testable before production.
Metrics to measure:
Building is only half the equation. Agents need infrastructure that can handle their unique runtime characteristics: unpredictable latency, variable token consumption, complex retry logic, and real-time decision-making across distributed systems.
A robust Run pillar provides:
This isn't about bolting AI onto existing API gateways. It's about runtime infrastructure that understands the fundamental differences between a REST call and a multi-turn agent conversation spanning multiple tool invocations.
In practice: An AI gateway sits in the request path between agents and LLM providers. When an agent makes an inference call, the gateway evaluates routing rules: simple classification tasks go to a fast, cheap model; complex reasoning goes to a frontier model; queries matching previous requests return cached responses instantly. If the primary provider hits rate limits or experiences latency spikes, traffic automatically fails over to a secondary provider. All of this happens transparently — the agent code doesn't change based on which model ultimately serves the request. The same platform also enables access to gateways that handle the agent's downstream API calls to enterprise systems, applying consistent authentication, rate limiting, and observability across both AI and traditional traffic.
Metrics to measure:
Agents are only as powerful as the tools they can access. The Discover pillar ensures that AI workloads can find, understand, and connect to the full breadth of enterprise capabilities.
This requires:
Discovery is where many agent deployments stall. An agent tasked with customer service automation is useless if it can't discover the order management API, the inventory system, and the CRM — and understand how they relate to each other.
The platform should make every enterprise capability agent-accessible by default.
In practice: A developer portal serves as the single catalog for all enterprise services: REST APIs, GraphQL endpoints, Kafka topics, and MCP-enabled tools. Each entry includes not just technical specs (OpenAPI definitions, schema references) but semantic descriptions that agents can parse: "Returns customer order history for a given customer ID," "Publishes inventory update events when stock levels change." When a platform team exposes a new service, they register it once in the portal; it's immediately discoverable by both human developers browsing the catalog and agents querying available tools at runtime. An agent building a response can dynamically look up which services are available, understand their capabilities through natural language descriptions, and invoke them through standardized protocols.
Metrics to measure:
Governance is where enterprise AI initiatives live or die. Without proper controls, agents become security liabilities and compliance nightmares. With too much friction, innovation grinds to a halt.
The Govern pillar balances these tensions through:
Critically, governance must be centralized but not centrally bottlenecked. Platform teams need visibility and control; development teams need autonomy to ship. The right architecture makes both possible.
In practice: Policies are defined centrally and enforced at the gateway layer. A platform team configures rules: "Production agents may not send PII to external LLM providers" — and the gateway automatically scans outbound prompts, redacting or blocking requests that contain sensitive patterns. Access controls determine which agents can call which backend services; a customer-facing agent might access order data but not internal pricing systems. Every request (prompt, response, tool call, downstream API invocation) is logged with full context, creating audit trails that satisfy compliance reviews. Dashboards give platform teams real-time visibility into agent behavior across the organization, while developers retain autonomy to build and deploy within the policy guardrails.
Metrics to measure:
The final pillar addresses two sides of the same economic question: how do we control what we spend on AI, and how do we capture value from our AI investments?
Cost Governance capabilities include:
Revenue Capture capabilities include:
Without cost governance, AI initiatives die in budget reviews. Without monetization pathways, they struggle to justify continued investment. The platform must enable both.
In practice: Every inference call flows through a metering layer that captures token counts, model used, latency, and requesting service. This data feeds dashboards showing cost attribution by team, application, and feature — finance can see exactly which business unit is driving AI spend, and engineering can identify which agents are inefficient. Budget thresholds trigger alerts or automatic throttling before costs spiral. For external monetization, the same metering infrastructure powers usage-based billing: an enterprise offering AI-powered APIs to partners meters consumption in real time, applies tiered pricing rules, and generates invoices automatically. The platform turns AI from an opaque cost center into a measurable, optimizable, and monetizable capability.
Metrics to measure:
These five pillars don't exist in isolation. The power of an Agentic AI Developer Platform comes from their integration.
When Build and Discover are connected, developers can browse available enterprise tools directly from their IDE. When Run and Govern share a control plane, every AI request flows through consistent security policies. When Govern and Monetize are unified, cost allocation and compliance happen automatically based on real usage.
Fragmented tools can address individual pillars. Only a platform approach delivers the compound benefits of true integration.
The enterprises winning in the agentic era aren't waiting for perfect solutions. They're building platforms today — establishing the foundations that will support increasingly sophisticated AI workloads tomorrow.
The five-pillar framework provides a blueprint: Build the tools developers need. Run workloads reliably at scale. Discover and connect enterprise capabilities. Govern with precision, not friction. Monetize to sustain growth and control costs.
The infrastructure you build now will determine how quickly your organization can move when the next wave of AI capabilities arrives.
The question isn't whether to invest in an Agentic AI Developer Platform.
It's whether you're building one — or falling behind those who are.
While LLM Ops tools focus primarily on the model lifecycle — fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment of the model itself — an Enterprise AI Agent Platform focuses on the application lifecycle. It manages the broader orchestration: connecting models to enterprise data, routing traffic, enforcing governance policies, and managing the stateful interactions of agents.
Traditional API gateways are designed for stateless, deterministic REST traffic. They lack the capabilities required for AI agent runtime architecture, such as token-based rate limiting, semantic caching (caching based on meaning rather than exact matches), and prompt inspection for PII. While you can route AI traffic through a standard gateway, you will miss out on critical cost-control and governance features specific to agentic AI infrastructure.
To prevent runaway LLM spend, your platform must implement granular cost governance. This includes setting budget thresholds at the team or agent level, utilizing semantic caching to serve repeat queries without incurring inference costs, and implementing intelligent routing that directs simpler tasks to smaller, cheaper models. Real-time metering and alerts are essential to catch spikes before they impact the budget.
Security is handled through the Discover and Govern pillars. Instead of giving agents direct, unfettered access to APIs, you should expose them through a service catalog with strict access controls. The platform should act as an intermediary, ensuring that agents can only access specific endpoints they are authorized for, and that all data flowing back to the agent is filtered for sensitivity.
The 5-pillar framework for a comprehensive agentic AI developer platform: consists of:
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