Agent Control Plane – Workato

Speakers: Adam Seligman (CTO) and Zayne Turner (Developer Advocate), Workato

Agent Control Plane Concept

Every agentic system has two layers:

Layer	Type	Responsibility
Reasoning Layer	Probabilistic	LLM, agents, decisions
Control Plane	Deterministic	Governance, auth, business logic

"The control plane needs to be correct every single time."

Factor	Description
1. Governance Operations	Protocols are thin; handle enterprise concerns yourself
2. Deterministic Mutations	Control plane owns all creates/writes/deletes
3. Intent-Based Communication	Tool calls about intent, not implementation details
4. Founded Access	Least privilege for probabilistic stakeholders
5. Safe Retries	Different retry patterns for stateless callers
6. Appropriate Errors	Error messages designed for reasoning callers
7. Structural Observability	Observability by design, not just logging

"Don't put enterprise concerns into the protocol where they don't belong."

Protocols like MCP are thin by design. Enterprises need to wrap them with governance, auth, and business logic.

Workato has been an integration platform for 10+ years. Customers are pulling them into the agent governance space.

"Customers are building agents way faster than the governance and controls can keep up."

Resource: White paper at workato.com/sevenfactors