Enterprise AI agents are execution systems

The term “enterprise AI agent” now covers products with very different operating models. Some summarize records or prepare documents; others are expected to change a system of record. The distinction becomes clear on an ERP workflow. Completing a purchase order or journal entry requires the agent to resolve tenant-specific schemas, legal entities, approval rules, and current transaction state—not merely produce a plausible recommendation.

A useful evaluation starts with the unit of work. Can the system finish a defined job on a heterogeneous ERP under the correct identity, policy, and audit controls? If a person must interpret the output, choose the action, and perform the write, the system is functioning as a copilot. That can still be valuable, but it is a different operational category.

What enterprise AI agents actually have to do

• Hold current tenant state, not a document dump or a long chat.
• Select function-specific tools and call them with correct parameters.
• Validate writes against the system of record, not against model confidence.
• Recover from partial failure—the default in enterprise software.
• Close a defined job with an audit trail. A paused thread is not done.

EGI represents this loop as an execution graph: intent, tool sequence, validation, recovery, and completion. Retrieval and long context can support individual steps, but neither specifies transaction semantics, compensating actions, or completion criteria. Those controls have to exist outside the model.

Model substitution is a useful architecture test: the execution contract should survive a change in the inference provider.

EGI’s answer

EGI’s approach is to pre-train and benchmark recurring execution patterns, then bind them to each tenant’s systems, identity, and policy. Bruce is the enterprise execution agent that runs those patterns across purchasing, finance, warehouse, operations, and revenue. Foundation models provide inference within the system; they do not define the transaction contract.

This definition makes the evaluation concrete. Inspect the job specification, the production trace, the resulting ERP state, and the recovery behavior. A product description or model benchmark cannot establish that the work completed correctly.