The Next Battle in Enterprise AI: Who Controls the Agent Control Plane?

Enterprise AI: Who Controls the Agent Control Plane?">

["The enterprise AI landscape is on the cusp of a significant shift. For the past two years, the focus has been on the model wars: OpenAI's GPT series versus Anthropic's Claude versus Google's Gemini. However, the next strategic fight may not be about which model answers a prompt best, but rather who controls the layer where agents plan, call tools, access data, run workflows, and prove to security teams that they did not do anything they were not supposed to do.", "New VB Pulse data suggests that the category of agent orchestration is already taking shape.

Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio led with 38.6% primary-platform adoption in February, while OpenAI's Assistants and Responses API held second place with 25.7%. Anthropic, although still small, made its first appearance in the tracker with 5.7% adoption. This is a significant development, as it marks the first sign of Claude usage moving from the model layer into native orchestration.", 'The stakes are high, as enterprises are not merely choosing chatbots but deciding where the live operational machinery of AI work will sit.

Enterprises are prioritizing security and permissions, with 39.3% and 37.1% of respondents citing these concerns as the top orchestration platform selection criterion in January and February, respectively. Control over agent execution and flexibility across models and tools are also crucial.', "Microsoft has an early lead, thanks to its distribution advantage with Microsoft 365, Teams, Entra ID, Azure, and existing procurement relationships. OpenAI's second-place position is also unsurprising, given its early mover advantage with developers.

Anthropic's emergence in orchestration comes as the broader VB Pulse data shows Claude gaining massive enterprise adoption at the model layer.", 'The risk for enterprises is lock-in, with a hybrid control plane combining provider-native orchestration with external orchestration being the leading expected architecture. Independent frameworks face an enterprise packaging problem, and the market may move toward more unified orchestration models, but interoperability, governance, and security will remain critical.']