AI and enterprise integration

AI didn’t break enterprise integration, argues Denis King at Solace, it just revealed the cracks

 

The modern enterprise is a marvel of digital complexity. Thousands of applications, potentially billions of data points, and increasingly intelligent agents making decisions at the edge of operations. But beneath this surface lies an architectural flaw that’s about to become impossible to ignore - enterprise integration is broken.

 

For decades, businesses have relied on traditional approaches, including APIs, batch jobs, and point-to-point integrations, to stitch their systems together. These methods were passable when integration was about moving data between a few back-office systems on a predictable schedule. But with the advent of AI, that era is over.

 

Today’s businesses demand more than data syncing and API orchestration. It requires real-time collaboration between people, applications, and now, increasingly, autonomous software agents powered by artificial intelligence. And those agents, unlike legacy systems, don’t wait for a nightly batch job or tolerate stale data. They act in milliseconds; they expect now.

 

This is the moment enterprises will realise just how outdated their integration strategies truly are.

 

 

Silos in a connected world

The world is ever increasingly interconnected, yet most businesses still aren’t. Consider the ripple effects of events like last year’s CrowdStrike outage or the Panama Canal drought. These real-world disruptions cascade across supply chains and markets, but inside most enterprises, key internal data remains trapped in silos.

 

In fact, it is estimated that only 12% of businesses report having integrated systems that function at a micro level, where individual events, such as a sensor alert or customer order, can trigger automated decisions across the organization. For the remaining 88%, integration still lives in the slow lane: disconnected departments, fragmented subsidiaries, and data that arrives too late to be truly useful.

 

This disjointedness isn’t just inefficient, in the age of intelligent agents and real-time expectations, it’s dangerous to businesses’ very survival. 

 

 

From data at rest to data in motion

The shift we’re witnessing is architectural, not incremental. Businesses aren’t just managing more data; they’re managing more events. Every action –a login, a payment, a temperature spike, a delivery scan – is an event that could (and should) inform intelligent decision-making across systems and stakeholders. But if that information is delayed, lost, or locked in legacy pipelines, the opportunity is gone. Or worse yet, taken up by a competitor with faster reactions and more granular insights. 

 

Agentic AI makes this gap more visible. These systems operate not on dashboards or summaries, but on data in motion. They don’t pull reports, they subscribe to the world. And when your architecture can’t keep up, your AI can’t either.

 

This is why traditional integration platforms like Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), while still valuable, aren’t enough on their own. Simultaneously, point-to-point models simply can’t scale to meet the demands of a business environment filled with unsynchronised real-time events.

 

 

Turning integration inside out

What’s needed now is not an incremental update, but a rethinking of integration itself, one that shifts from central control to edge enablement.

 

This is the promise of event-driven integration. At its core, it transforms the way systems communicate: instead of pulling data from one place to another on a schedule, systems publish and subscribe to events in real-time through a decentralized network of event brokers, or something we call an event mesh. This makes data immediately available to all relevant users, whether human, machine or agent.

 

Integration becomes more like an autonomic nervous system than a plumbing system, responsive, distributed, and resilient.

 

This “inside-out” approach flips the script. Instead of building brittle integrations in the core, we push them to the edge. Instead of tightly coupling applications, we enable loosely coupled event flows. The result is a digital architecture that is more scalable, more agile and, critically, more ready for the next wave of innovation.

 

 

From hype to hard reality

With analyst firms like Gartner and IDC already endorsing the shift toward “event-native” architectures, it’s clear that this is not just a passing trend. It’s a foundational shift that aligns with how modern systems and AI are designed to operate.

 

Agentic AI may be the trigger, but the implications are far broader. Integration is no longer a backstage IT function; it’s a front-line capability that determines whether your business can respond, adapt, and thrive in real-time.

 

For forward-thinking leaders, the mandate is clear: Start treating it as a living system, one that reflects the speed, scale, and intelligence of the world. Considering where we are right now, only one kind of enterprise will win: the one that moves with its data, not behind it.

 

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Denis King is CEO at Solace

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and asbe