AI Did Not Break Enterprise Integration, It Just Revealed the Cracks

The modern enterprise is a marvel of digital complexity. Thousands of applications, potentially billions of data points, and increasingly intelligent agents making decisions at the edge of operations. But beneath this surface lies an architectural flaw that is about to become impossible to ignore—enterprise integration is broken.

For decades, businesses have relied on traditional approaches including APIs, batch jobs, and point-to-point integrations to stitch their systems together. These methods were passable when enterprise integration was about moving data between a few back-office systems on a predictable schedule. But with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that era is over.

Today’s businesses demand more than data syncing and API orchestration. It requires real-time collaboration between people, applications, and now, increasingly, autonomous software agents powered by AI. And those agents, unlike legacy systems, do not wait for a nightly batch job or tolerate stale data. They act in milliseconds, they expect now.

This is the moment enterprises will realise just how outdated their integration strategies truly are.

Silos in a Connected World

The world is ever increasingly interconnected, yet most businesses still are not. Consider real-world disruptions like major IT outages—they ripple quickly across supply chains and markets. Yet within most enterprises, key internal data remains trapped in silos, limiting their ability to respond with speed and agility.

In fact, in the APAC region, only about 27% of businesses have fully connected systems where micro-level events, such as sensor alerts or customer orders, can automatically trigger coordinated decisions across the organisation. For the remaining 73%, enterprise integration still lives in the slow lane: disconnected departments, fragmented subsidiaries, and data that arrives too late to be truly useful.

This disjointedness is not just inefficient, in the age of intelligent agents and real-time expectations, it is dangerous to businesses’ very survival.

From Data at Rest to Data in Motion

The shift we are witnessing is architectural, not incremental. Businesses are not just managing more data; they are managing more events. Every action—a login, a payment, a temperature spike, a delivery scan—is an event that could (and should) inform intelligent decision-making across systems and stakeholders. But if that information is delayed, lost, or locked in legacy pipelines, the opportunity is gone. Or worse yet, taken up by a competitor with faster reactions and more granular insights.

Agentic AI makes this gap more visible. These systems operate not on dashboards or summaries, but on data in motion. They do not pull reports, they subscribe to the world. And when your architecture cannot keep up, your AI cannot either.

This is why traditional integration platforms like Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), while still valuable, are not enough on their own. Simultaneous, point-to-point models simply cannot scale to meet the demands of a business environment filled with unsynchronised real-time events.

Turning Enterprise Integration Inside-Out

What is needed now is not an incremental update, but a rethinking of integration itself, one that shifts from central control to edge enablement.

This is the promise of event-driven integration. At its core, it transforms the way systems communicate: Instead of pulling data from one place to another on a schedule, systems publish and subscribe to events in real-time through a decentralised network of event brokers, or something we call an event mesh. This makes data immediately available to all relevant users, whether human, machine, or agent.

Enterprise integration becomes more like an autonomic nervous system than a plumbing system, responsive, distributed, and resilient.

This “inside-out” approach flips the script. Instead of building brittle integrations in the core, we push them to the edge. Instead of tightly coupling applications, we enable loosely coupled event flows. The result is a digital architecture that is more scalable, more agile, and critically, more ready for the next wave of innovation.

From Hype to Hard Reality

With analyst firms like Gartner and IDC already endorsing the shift toward “event-native” architectures, it is clear that this is not just a passing trend. It’s a foundational shift that aligns with how modern systems and AI, are designed to operate.

Agentic AI may be the trigger, but the implications are far broader. Integration is no longer a backstage IT function, it’s a front-line capability that determines whether your business can respond, adapt, and thrive in real-time.

For forward-thinking leaders, the mandate is clear: Start treating it as a living system, one that reflects the speed, scale, and intelligence of the world. Considering where we are right now, only one kind of enterprise will win: the one that moves with its data, not behind it.