Agentic Workflows in 2026: What to Expect

The rapid progress of 2025 set the stage. Now, as we enter 2026, organisations are asking: what comes next? Here are the trends and developments we expect to shape agentic workflows over the coming year.

Multi-agent collaboration

The first wave of agentic workflows typically involved single agents handling discrete tasks. In 2026, we expect to see more sophisticated architectures where multiple agents work together.

This might look like:

• A research agent gathering information, passing it to an analysis agent, which then hands off to a drafting agent.
• Specialist agents for different domains - legal, technical, financial - collaborating on complex decisions.
• Supervisor agents that orchestrate and quality-check the work of other agents.

Multi-agent systems introduce new challenges around coordination, consistency and debugging, but they also unlock capabilities that single agents cannot match.

Deeper enterprise integration

Integration was a major theme in 2025. In 2026, we expect it to go deeper.

Agent platforms will offer richer, out-of-the-box connectors for major enterprise systems. Real-time data streaming will become more common, allowing agents to react to events as they happen rather than working with periodic snapshots. APIs will be designed with agents in mind, not just human users.

Organisations that invested in integration infrastructure in 2025 will find themselves well positioned to take advantage of these advances.

Regulation and governance mature

Regulators have been watching the rise of AI agents closely. In 2026, we expect clearer guidance - and in some jurisdictions, binding rules - on how agentic systems should be governed.

Key areas to watch include:

• Transparency requirements: Mandates for explaining agent decisions to affected parties.
• Accountability frameworks: Clarification of who is responsible when agents make mistakes.
• Industry-specific rules: Sector regulators in finance, healthcare and other sensitive domains issuing tailored guidance.

Forward-thinking organisations will treat regulatory developments as an opportunity to strengthen their governance practices, not just a compliance burden.

The rise of agent operations

As agents become a permanent part of enterprise infrastructure, the discipline of “agent operations” - or AgentOps - will emerge.

This will include:

• Monitoring and observability for agent performance.
• Incident management when agents behave unexpectedly.
• Continuous improvement cycles to refine agent behaviour based on feedback.
• Capacity planning as agent workloads grow.

Just as DevOps transformed software delivery, AgentOps will transform how organisations manage intelligent automation.

Smaller models, more specialisation

The arms race for ever-larger AI models will continue, but 2026 will also see a counter-trend: smaller, more specialised models tuned for specific tasks.

For enterprise agentic workflows, this means:

• Lower costs for high-volume use cases.
• Faster response times for latency-sensitive processes.
• Greater control over model behaviour through fine-tuning and customisation.

Organisations will increasingly mix and match models, using large general-purpose models for complex reasoning and smaller specialist models for routine tasks.

Human-agent collaboration evolves

The relationship between humans and agents will continue to mature. Early adopters will develop sophisticated approaches to supervision, exception handling and feedback.

Expect to see:

• More nuanced escalation policies, where agents know when to ask for help and how to frame the question.
• Richer feedback mechanisms that help agents learn from corrections.
• New roles and career paths for people who specialise in working alongside agents.

The organisations that get human-agent collaboration right will outperform those that treat agents as either fully autonomous or just another tool.

Security moves to the foreground

As agents gain access to more systems and data, security concerns will intensify. In 2026, we expect:

• More robust authentication and authorisation frameworks for agents.
• Better tooling for detecting and responding to agent misbehaviour.
• Greater scrutiny of agent supply chains - the models, data and integrations they depend on.

Security will no longer be an afterthought; it will be a first-order consideration in every agentic workflow design.

The year ahead

2026 will be a year of maturation. The early hype will give way to hard work: building sustainable operations, navigating regulation, and delivering measurable business outcomes.

Organisations that approach the year with pragmatism and discipline will pull ahead. Those that expect magic without effort will be disappointed.

The agentic future is arriving. The question is whether your organisation is ready to meet it.