05-06-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

We need a Switzerland for the agentic future

No single vendor will own the AI ecosystem, so we need a neutral broker as the agentic nervous system.

[Photo: Getty Images]

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more.

BY Khozema Shipchandler

The conversation is changing. For the first time ever, the person or thing on the other side of an interaction isn’t always human. Every time I talk with other executives, the “agentic future” comes up. It’s a compelling idea: agents replacing old systems to actually solve problems for us without oversight. With more than a billion AI agents poised to handle everything from customer complaints to complex trades by 2029, the hurdle isn’t the tech itself. It’s whether we can actually trust it.

The reality is that most businesses are stuck in the pilot stage. Not for failure of imagination, but because we don’t have the right tools to move from a cool demo to a smart system that works safely at scale.

The old plumbing, or legacy infrastructure, wasn’t built for an agentic future. Workflows break easily. Data is trapped in silos. Trust is bolted on versus being built in. The result: As we deploy more agents, complexity will turn into chaos.

What’s missing is a trusted, neutral middle ground, a Switzerland for the modern tech........

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