Microsoft and ServiceNow Target the AI Agent Control Layer

Dewain Robinson (0:01)

Welcome to the Cloud Wars AI Minute. I'm your host, Dwayne Robinson, where I go over everything you need to know that your boss expects you to know inside of the AI world. And what I want to talk about today is that we're actually seeing the agent war moving up to the control layer. And what we mean by this is that it's no longer that we're starting to see people fighting over models, and what's the best model, and how are we going to do this? We're actually seeing that there's a new control layer that's really becoming the core part of what you're starting to see, everyone fighting over this space. And this is really where we're going to start seeing governance and control becoming the more important part as we continue to move forward. And so when we start looking at this, I'll give you an example. ServiceNow is building a layer that governs what agents do with it. And this is going to be shipped on the open protocol of MCP. But if we look over at Microsoft, Microsoft, who is building out Work IQ, is going to make sure that they also expose over MCP, A2A and REST. So what you're going to find is that a lot of these governance and controls and also the way that they're building these services to be able to allow you to be able to get access to this information, they're actually not building their own proprietary protocols. They're actually leveraging the out of the box available ones that are basically industry standards at this point. And that's actually a really good sign for the way that things are going. And it also means that what we're also starting to see in this governance space is where we start to see reliance and integration starting to happen across all of these different layers. So this is going to be a very big and interesting move as we continue to see all these different companies starting to buy or do acquisitions. Also you'll see a lot of integrations, a lot of strategic alliances starting to come together because they're going to be able to build these integrations at this control layer and governance layer.

And I would fully expect that this is going to be a place that we need to keep a strong eye on as we continue to move forward. And of course, here at Cloud Wars, we'll make sure that we continue to take a look at this particular space and bring you up to speed on news and things that are happening in this space specifically, because it is so important that this is the core place that companies and projects need to see governance and control in order to be able to really release AI to be able to do larger and larger initiatives and organizations. So it makes sense that companies that are building on this are going to build very good high quality integration layers. And we're going to start seeing more and more partnership and movement in this space.