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Jitterbit alerts partners to AI agent sprawl
The rush by users to embrace the technology is creating its own headaches, presenting the channel with an alternative to pitch
The tendency of customers to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) agents to handle specific functions has seen an increasing volume of tools being deployed across businesses.
That spread of AI agents is causing headaches, and Bill Conner, Jitterbit’s president and CEO, has alerted its channel partners to the increasing need to help customers navigate the sprawl.
He has been speaking to partners in London and Germany this week, as the firm rolls out its integration platform as a service AI assistant, part of its unified platform, which brings together AI agents, data automation and intelligent apps under one layered architecture.
“We’ve been building AI into this platform that starts with integration, does API [application programming interface], and can build apps and then EDI [electronic data interchange] all on low code,” said Conner, adding that the firm looked at how AI agents fitted into that picture and introduced three agents – knowledge base, sales and HR – to support users.
He said the ability to build agents would also be attractive for partners that were looking to add more options to the integration services they provided.
Conner warned that users were increasingly deploying agents for single use cases, and that the numbers were mounting up across organisations, with channel partners seen as one source of help with the growing AI sprawl. “One of the concepts we’re reducing today is something called AI agent sprawl, because if you look at what’s happening now, most of the customers are getting hit with AI agents, but they’re micro processed, micro segmented, single workflow, one at a time,” he said. “Tastes great, but they’re light.
“The problem is, everyone’s got a million of them that they’re trying to market,” said Conner. “It’s kind of like a startup’s dream of AI, right? The great thing is, they look great. They’re much more focused, so it doesn’t have the problems of the last 12 months with AI projects. It started with a technology and a focus, but not a use case. These agents are tied more to an outcome, so you feel like there’s a better ROI. The problem is that you can’t build orchestrators to deal with agent sprawl if the organisation just starts building these one-off or buying them one-off. That’s what we’re trying to build and show, that framework.”
Increase in deployment
Conner said that around 83% of firms had indicated in research they were looking to deploy more AI agents in the next three years, and a similar percentage had already deployed agents across the business.
“There are people with a dozen, but there are people with 20, 30, 40 already, and it’s everyone rolling out their own,” he added. “There’s not an orchestrator made by God that can manage this agent sprawl.”
Conner said partners needed to talk to customers about the consequences of sprawl and promote solutions with a framework architecture that provided a more manageable outcome.
Jitterbit is in the early days of building a channel, but he said it was operating in a growing market and taking an approach that would arm those that worked with the vendor with a solid pitch.
“We’re giving channels, wherever they’re starting from, an opportunity to grow,” said Conner. “We have an MSSP offering that they can put a common infrastructure in for integration, and now look at endpoint as a customer integration, as opposed to an internal enterprise endpoint for integration within the business.
“I think we’re one of the first to bring that to our partners with a model that they understand and fits them around billing.”
