Agentic orchestration goes native, and why that is good news
10 June 2026 - ai governance / agentic systems / strategy
The big model vendors are shipping native agentic workflow orchestration. If you spent the last two years building that plumbing yourself, the easy reaction is to feel the moat drain away. I read it the other way.
Bespoke tooling has a short half-life
In a fast-moving AI platform landscape, anything you hand-build at the infrastructure layer has a short half-life. The orchestration loop, the retry logic, the cross-session memory: useful today, absorbed into the platform tomorrow. That is not failure. That is the platform doing its job, and it frees you to stop maintaining undifferentiated plumbing.
The value moves up a level
What does not get commoditised is judgement about where to apply the capability and how to govern it. In regulated industries the hard questions are not “can an agent run a workflow” but “who is accountable for what it did, against which obligation, and how do we evidence that to a regulator”. That is governance, and it is where I have been pointing Unity.
What I am carrying forward
- Build on the platform, not under it. Let the vendor own the orchestration substrate.
- Put the differentiation in the accountability and regulatory layer, where the domain knowledge lives.
- Be willing to climb to the next problem when a platform absorbs the last one.
The plumbing becoming native is a validation of where the work was always heading, not a threat to it.