VentureBeat | May 1, 2026 2:14 PM PT

Enterprise AI teams are hitting a wall -- not because their models can't reason, but because the workflows underneath them were never built for agents. Tasks fail, handoffs break, and the problem compounds as organizations push agents deeper into back-office systems. A new architectural layer is emerging to address it: workflow execution control planes that impose deterministic structure on processes agents are expected to run. One of the companies bringing this to the forefront is Salesforce, with a new workflow platform that turns back-office workflows into a set of tasks for specialized agents to complete. Users can upload their processes or use one of the set Blueprints provided by Salesforce, and Agentforce Operations will break it down for agents. Salesforce senior vice president of Product, Sanjna Parulekar, told VentureBeat that the problem is that many enterprise workflows are not built for agents. "What we've observed with customers is that a lot of times, the brokenness in a process is probably in your product requirements document," Parulekar said. "So when that's uploaded into a product, it doesn't quite work. We can optimize it and cut out some things and replace it with an agent." Without this control panel layer, enterprises could risk deploying agents that increase cost rather than fix their workflow problems. Enterprises deploying agents are learning a costly lesson: Their workflows were designed around human judgment gaps, not machine execution. Processes that evolved through years of workarounds -- loosely defined steps, implicit decisions, coordination that depends on individuals knowing what to do next -- break when agents are asked to follow them literally. Even with all of an enterprise's context at its fingertips, AI systems will have difficulty completing tasks if it is not clear what it's supposed to do.

Read more