An infrastructure category that acts as the control plane for enterprise AI agents, managing routing, security, observability, and governance.
Detailed explanation
Agent Gateway is a new infrastructure category that is rapidly consolidating in the enterprise AI market. Companies like Nutanix, Arcade, and Palo Alto/Portkey are building products that function as the "control plane" for enterprise AI: routing agent requests, applying security policies, monitoring cost and behavior, and ensuring compliance. For product managers scaling agents in production, an Agent Gateway is the layer that enables governing multiple agents from multiple providers without losing control of cost, security, and auditing. It is the API Gateway equivalent for the AI agent world.
How to use it in product decisions
An agent gateway becomes useful when several teams, models, or tools must share policies. Centralize identity, authorization, spending limits, routing, and logs while preserving clear owners for every workflow. Before buying or building, estimate the cost of maintaining those rules separately and compare it with the risk of creating a single point of failure. Measure correct blocks, false positives, added latency, and incident investigation time. The gateway should reduce operational variability without hiding critical decisions from product teams.