Move from one helpful assistant to a governed system of work
A single assistant can answer a question. A well-designed agent system can divide a business goal into bounded tasks, call approved tools, coordinate specialists, ask for human approval, and finish the work in the systems where it belongs. Altivate designs that operating system around your processes, permissions, and evidence—not around a model demo.
A governed multi-agent operating loop.
- Intent: A measurable business goal and a named owner
- Orchestrate: Plan work and route it to specialist agents
- Act: Use approved tools, APIs, and enterprise workflows
- Verify: Check evidence, policy, and outcome before closure
Outcome: Auditable work completed across SAP and the wider enterprise landscape
What makes an agent system production-grade
Autonomy earns its place only when responsibility, access, and failure behaviour are designed as carefully as reasoning.
A controlled path from workflow to agent team
The first release should be small enough to govern and valuable enough to measure.
Choose a queue, not a slogan
Start with a real backlog—order exceptions, supplier inquiries, service requests, or close activities—and establish cycle time, quality, and cost baselines.
Map authority and failure
Define what each agent may read, propose, and execute; where humans approve; how retries behave; and what happens when systems or models disagree.
Integrate through governed tools
Expose narrow, typed actions over SAP and adjacent applications with least privilege, idempotency, rate limits, and complete audit logs.
Release by earned autonomy
Begin in observe or recommend mode, measure performance on live work, and grant action authority only where the evidence supports it.
Match autonomy to business risk
Not every task needs the same control boundary.
| Mode | What the agent does | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Observe | Reads events and assembles context without changing a system. | Early warning, triage, compliance monitoring |
| Recommend | Proposes an action with sources, confidence, and impact for a person to approve. | Planning, exception resolution, high-value decisions |
| Act with approval | Prepares the transaction and executes only after an authorized confirmation. | Supplier changes, customer commitments, finance workflows |
| Act within policy | Completes low-risk work inside explicit thresholds, budgets, and rollback rules. | High-volume routine operations with strong controls |
Enterprise workflows suited to coordinated agents
The best candidates cross teams or systems and currently lose time in hand-offs.
Multi-agent orchestration FAQ
Do we need MCP and A2A to build enterprise agents?
No. They are useful interoperability standards, not business requirements. We use them when they reduce proprietary integration work without weakening authorization, observability, or supportability.
Can agents transact in SAP?
Yes, through approved APIs, workflows, or automation layers with SAP roles, business rules, approval thresholds, and complete logging preserved. Direct unrestricted access is not an acceptable shortcut.
How do we prevent agents from looping or overspending?
Every run receives explicit limits for steps, time, token or transaction cost, retries, and tool scope. Circuit breakers and human escalation stop work when evidence, authority, or expected progress is missing.
