Integration for AI Agents, Part 1: Which of Your Patterns Still Pay Off
AI agents are about to use your business systems the way your staff do. We work out which of your integration spending still pays off.
About this page. Aitina Tech’s R&D wing applies the research of Imtiaz Hassan, published as The Software Lens, in client work and in our own product. This page is the applied view: what the pattern is, how we build it, and what an engagement looks like. The full research is on The Software Lens.
Every generation of integration bet on who the caller is. The next caller reasons: it finds services for itself, combines them on the fly and has to be stopped at the boundary rather than in code it never sees. Knowing which of your patterns survive that caller avoids paying twice, once to keep the old approach and again to replace it in a hurry.
From the research
“This is not rip and replace; it is a change in what the integration layer is for.”
What we take from it. Most of what your integration team knows still applies. Our job is to show which patterns to keep, which to retire, and where the integration layer's job has changed.
How we apply it
Most of the integration canon survives, and we keep it: messaging, idempotency, the anti-corruption layer, the tolerant reader and the strangler fig matter more under agents, not less. What changes is the integration layer's job. The central bus, the bespoke connector and the integration team as gatekeeper fade; the shared data model returns as a business vocabulary; the service registry finally gets a reader that uses it.
Our R&D wing is testing this on the most ordinary pair of systems a company has: the HR platform and the finance ledger, joined as two capabilities built to the SaaC pattern rather than by a nightly connector. Each system exposes one capability with a description an agent can read, rules it cannot break and a signed receipt for every call. The findings feed straight into our software integration and API and MCP development work for clients, where every engagement now includes the question "can an agent use this?"
What an engagement looks like
A first engagement is an integration review: an inventory of what you have, which patterns to keep, change or retire for an agent caller, and where the quick wins are. The second part covers the architecture we then build to.
The research behind it
This page is Aitina Tech’s applied account of Enterprise Integration Patterns in the Agentic Era, Part 1, by Imtiaz Hassan, published on The Software Lens. The full argument, the diagrams and the worked examples are there; this page is what we do with it for clients.