What is an agent control plane?
An agent control plane is a layer that inventories, governs and audits AI agents across vendors and platforms. It applies one set of policies to what those agents do, separately from the tools used to build and run them.
Where the term comes from
Forrester named the agent control plane as a market in December 2025, defining it as “an enterprise control plane that inventories, governs, orchestrates, and assures heterogeneous AI agents across vendors and domains.” Forrester places it beside two other planes: a build plane, where agentic systems are constructed, and an orchestration plane, where agents are embedded into business processes. The control plane provides oversight out of band from both.
Five capabilities
- Inventory and identity: a catalog of every agent and the permissions it holds.
- Policies and guardrails: business, risk and technical policy applied at runtime.
- Monitoring and insights: visibility into agent behavior and performance.
- Control and coordination: managing how agents interact across environments.
- Risk, compliance and auditing: decisions recorded in an auditable form.
Why a separate layer
Most enterprises run agents on several platforms, each with its own console, identity model and logs. Each platform governs its own agents. A control plane applies one policy and one record across all of them, and that policy stays in place when a model, tool or platform changes.
Agent control plane vs. AI gateway
An AI gateway sits on model traffic: it manages keys, routes requests between providers and enforces rate limits. An agent control plane is scoped to the agent. Its decisions cover model calls, tool calls and agent-to-agent calls, tied to the identity of the agent making them, and every decision is recorded for audit.
CompFly's control plane
CompFly is one inline control point for every model, tool and agent-to-agent call. Each agent carries its own identity, policy is decided before execution, and every decision lands in a tamper-evident record.
See runtime governanceSource: Leslie Joseph, Forrester, “Announcing Our Evaluation of the Agent Control Plane Market”, December 4, 2025.