AI Will Reinvent Business Applications Into An Agentic Business Fabric

AI agents will fundamentally reimagine the mature market of enterprise business applications into an agentic business fabric. This is a transformative architectural paradigm for the next generation of enterprise operations. Today’s business models require a fully connected value chain. Yesterday’s legacy environments cannot adapt to enable this change.

The agentic business fabric is not just an evolution of current business applications; it is also a new paradigm designed for autonomous operation, perpetual learning, and optimization. It’s an integrated network of capabilities where data, AI, workflows, business logic, and user experiences are deeply interwoven. It consists of six core capabilities:

  1. The experience layer, which becomes a smart, adaptive interface for work. Experiences adapt to the user, skill level, and job to be done. Training dissolves into real-time “learning by doing.” Employees shift from today’s task execution to exception handling and AI supervision.
  2. The agent fabric, which orchestrates and optimizes AI agents. It is a mesh of AI agents — from vendors/partners or custom-developed — that coordinate, adapt, and learn across the business.
  3. The application mesh, which interconnects components, workflows, and platforms. The application mesh will evolve into a set of vendor-provided microservices, deterministic and compliance-based workflows, and custom components built via AI-infused low-code/no-code platforms.
  4. The data fabric with semantic intelligence, which powers AI decisions. A data fabric will unify, govern, and operationalize data across silos, clouds, and formats.
  5. The edge, which becomes a significant operational front line. Whether in factories, retail floors, or embedded sensors, edge nodes will process data, run AI inference, and execute automation instantly — without depending on cloud round trips.
  6. The trust layer, which provides pervasive protection and control. Governance, security, and control infuse AI-driven defenses directly into every agent, service, workflow, and data access. It’s a nonnegotiable layer to this architecture.

The Agentic Business Fabric Changes Everything In Business Operations

The agentic business fabric isn’t just a technological evolution; it’s a fundamental rewiring of the principles of business operations.

Eventually, business operations will become completely AI-driven. Jobs to be done will fundamentally shift; org structures will be flatter and more aligned; monetization will be based on value (consumption and outcomes); and partner ecosystems will shift to more strategic work instead of core implementation tasks.

How To Adopt The Agentic Business Fabric

The agentic business fabric will fix the challenges of technical debt, data silos, and slow innovation that plague current IT environments. But the shift won’t be easy, and operations will get more complex before they become easier.

Read our report and connect via inquiry to understand the details of this architecture and access Forrester’s framework for navigating the path to an agentic enterprise. Learn what you need to do right now to prepare you for this future.