Unified AI Gateways: The New Control Layer for Agents
A unified AI gateway platform is an enterprise control layer that centralizes how autonomous AI agents connect to data, tools, and workflows while enforcing consistent policies, security, and governance across every interaction. As agents spread across business units, this centralized layer is becoming as important as identity or network security. Instead of each team wiring agents directly into APIs and systems, a unified control plane now sits in the middle, authenticating agents, logging actions, and applying policies in real time. This shift tackles the core gap between rapid AI agent deployment and enterprise AI security: organizations want agents that can act across systems, but cannot afford blind spots around data access, accountability, or cost. Unified AI gateways promise a standard way to discover, observe, and govern agents so they can move from pilots to production without losing control.
Palo Alto Networks and Portkey: Building an Agentic Security Fabric
Palo Alto Networks is pushing the unified AI gateway concept directly into security. After acquiring Portkey, the company is integrating Portkey’s AI Gateway into Prisma AIRS as a mission-critical unified control plane for AI agent security and governance. The idea is to identify, authenticate, and authorize every agentic interaction in real time, so security teams see which agents are active, what tools they call, and which data they request. According to Palo Alto Networks, 81% of enterprises are piloting or have implemented AI agent solutions, which turns agent behavior into a large, often invisible attack surface. Prisma AIRS 3.0 is presented as a way to secure the entire agentic AI lifecycle through a single AI gateway platform instead of scattered controls in each team’s environment. That places the gateway at the center of enterprise AI security, not on the edges.
ServiceNow: From Governance Center to Frontline AI Execution
ServiceNow is repositioning its platform as the governance and action layer for enterprise agents, identities, and workflows, and then pushing that layer to frontline workers. The company’s Autonomous Security and Risk product combines Armis for asset intelligence with Veza for identity and access visibility, routing both into security and risk workflows as one operating model. At the governance level, an expanded AI Control Tower is designed to discover, observe, govern, secure, and measure AI across systems, while Action Fabric and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server open ServiceNow to external agents built on platforms such as Claude, Copilot, and custom stacks. On the frontline, the new Otto experience becomes a conversational front door for employees, unified from Now Assist, Moveworks, and previous AI tools. Any work completed through Otto is governed by AI Control Tower, bringing autonomous agent governance directly into day-to-day execution.
Otto and the Push to Governed AI for Every Employee
Otto shows how unified control planes are moving from back-office consoles to the point of work. ServiceNow describes Otto as an AI experience that “turns intent into enterprise work for every person and across every workflow,” with natural-language and voice interfaces and the ability to query enterprise data sources like documents, wikis, databases, and SharePoint. The Moveworks acquisition adds a stronger conversational layer; partners describe the front door as Moveworks with Now Assist doing the background work. Crucially, AI Control Tower governs actions initiated through Otto, grounding them in customer data, policies, and approval chains. This model reflects a broader pattern in autonomous agent governance: put a single AI gateway platform in charge of policies and telemetry, then expose agent capabilities through simple interfaces for operators, service teams, managers, and employees who do not need to understand the underlying agent architecture.
JetStream Security and the Enterprise AI Governance Crisis
JetStream Security is emerging as a specialist infrastructure builder for autonomous agent governance, recognized on Redpoint Ventures’ 2026 InfraRed 100 list. The company focuses on the gap between how fast teams can build AI agents and how slowly governance frameworks have evolved. JetStream’s AI Blueprints are dynamic, system-generated graphs that map how AI agents operate in real time, what data they access, what tools they call, what they cost, and who is accountable for each action. Unlike static architecture diagrams, these Blueprints track live runtime behavior and flag deviations from authorized purposes, giving security and engineering teams a single source of truth. JetStream’s CEO Raj Rajamani notes that many enterprises “sit on game-changing AI agents they already built but can't deploy, simply because the governance layer doesn't exist.” Unified AI gateways and such observability tools are becoming the missing layer that turns pilots into production deployments.