Your 7-Step Checklist for AI Agent Integration
A pragmatic, low-risk method for delivering AI value in weeks, not years
Integrating AI agents into an organisation’s landscape isn’t easy.
The hype on social media promises a future of autonomous organisations, of self-healing systems and hyper-personalised customer experiences, all orchestrated by intelligent AI agents.
But, for the Chief Information Officer or Head of Integration sitting on a multi-million-pound investment, this vision is very disconnected from daily reality.
Why?
Because we don’t live in a greenfield world.
Businesses are complex creatures in 2025, with sprawling digital nervous systems built over decades.
In many cases, a landscape is made up of thousands of carefully crafted integration processes that connect critical systems - SAP for finance, Salesforce for customers, and a myriad of bespoke, industry-specific platforms.
These integrations are the lifeblood of an organisation, the digital plumbing that ensures data flows from one part of the business to another.
The prevailing narrative suggests we should simply “bolt on” AI, as if it were a printer in your home. This approach is fraught with peril.
It’s expensive, risky, and fundamentally misunderstands how value is created in a modern enterprise.
How can an AI agent, sitting outside this intricate web of system architecture ever hope to understand the context, the history, and the subtle nuances of the data flowing through it?
How do you move from a PowerPoint presentation about AI to a tangible, value-generating implementation without initiating a multi-year, high-risk transformation project that threatens to disrupt the very systems that keep the business running?
I have a few ideas. Let’s get into what they are.
Some Integration Landscapes are Treasure Maps
OK, that might be a stretch for some organisations, but if you’re lucky and your IT estate is well documented, you can have a lot of fun finding the nuggets of gold in the hills of your day job.
In my experience, the key to successful AI integration is not to look outwards at abstract AI platforms, but to look inwards at the data already flowing through their existing integration environments.
The integration platform itself, far from being a legacy system to be circumvented, can in fact a treasure map pointing directly to the most valuable opportunities for AI.
When we analyse such systems through the lens integration processes, we uncovered a rich tapestry of information.
The Digital Hubs
It’s important to identify early on which systems are the organisation’s centre of gravity. In an enterprise environment, it’ll be clear to see hundreds of processes connecting to specific top tier systems like SAP and Salesforce.
These are the high-traffic intersections of the business, the digital equivalents of London’s King’s Cross station.
The Business Processes
The naming conventions of the integration processes, while sometimes cryptic, allow you to start categorising them by business function. Once you can clearly distinguish between financial processes (handling purchase orders and invoices), commercial processes (managing customer data), and highly regulated clinical or safety processes, you begin to see the opportunity to prioritise your agentic ambitions.
The Hidden Risks
Here’s a top tip - If you can identify the “pay and chase” scenarios, where money is paid out for expenses or claims, where fraud detection happening days or weeks later, if at all - these are the agentic use cases that get you promoted!
If you see manual review bottlenecks, where human teams are struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of data, leading to errors and inconsistencies - these are the nuggets you’re looking for.
The Approach - Weave, Don’t Bolt
I wrote a few weeks ago about what I think of the “bolt on” strategy for AI agents here. The same principle applies with the topic of integration.
The answer is not to bolt on a monolithic AI brain, but to weave in a network of specialised, intelligent agents at the precise points where they can add the most value.
This approach treats AI as a surgical enhancement, not a sledgehammer.
It leverages your existing integration platform as the perfect delivery mechanism for these agents.
This methodology can be distilled into a seven-step checklist, a pragmatic guide to moving from idea to impact.