The Great Process Re-Engineering: Who’s Running the Agents?

Detailed summary

AI agents are multiplying across the enterprise. Orchestration is fast becoming the next challenge.

AI agents are moving beyond experimentation and into critical business processes. But with more agents making decisions and taking action, a more urgent question is emerging: who – or what – is actually in control?

For Camunda’s regional vice-president APAC, Jared McMahon, the challenge isn't simply managing more AI.

Instead, he said it’s ensuring organisations can see how agents, automation tools, people and systems interact across an end-to-end process, and understand the decisions being made along the way.

“Humans don't necessarily automatically trust what they can't see,” McMahon told iTnews. “If those AI agents or automation tools are doing these activities and tasks in isolation, you can't trust what you can't see.”

Indeed, it’s a challenge becoming more acute as AI moves from personal productivity and isolated use cases into business processes involving multiple systems, decisions and participants.

Camunda’s 2026 AI Process Gap research, conducted by Sapio Research among 1,000 senior IT, operations and transformation decision-makers at large organisations in the US and Europe, found that enterprises have an average of more than 50 endpoints within their business processes.

“Adding AI as an active participant introduces another layer of complexity into environments that were already highly interconnected,” he said.

While individual AI agents and automation tools can be highly effective at specific tasks (answering a question, responding to a query or processing a payment), McMahon said complex enterprise outcomes rarely depend on a single task.

Instead, they involve a series of activities and decisions across an end-to-end process.

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