The numbers don't lie, but they do confuse. 96% of enterprises now use AI agents in some capacity. And 94% of them are concerned about agent sprawl, governance gaps, and losing control of systems they themselves deployed. That's not a contradiction — it's the defining engineering tension of 2026. The Adoption Wave Outpaced the Governance Infrastructure Gartner's data tells the story clearly: multi-agent system inquiries surged 1,445% from Q1 2024 to Q2 2025. Enterprise teams moved fast — often team by team, use case by use case — without a unified framework for how agents should communicate, fail safely, or be monitored. The result looks a lot like the microservices wave of 2015. Every team shipped independently. Productivity spiked initially. Then the observability debt came due. With agents, the problem is worse for one key reason: agents act . They don't just process data — they make API calls, trigger workflows, write code, and send messages. When they go wrong, they go wrong fast.…