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What if the secret to scaling AI agents has nothing to do with better prompts and everything to do with smarter integration? We sit down with Rich Waldron Co-founder & CEO of Tray dot ai to unpack how an integration-first architecture turns agent hype into measurable business outcomes. From cloud-native orchestration to resilient API handling, Rich explains why the hardest part of agents isn’t connectivity—it’s everything behind it: concurrency, retries, governance, logging, and security.

We dig into the real reasons enterprise pilots stall and the pattern he sees among programs that succeed: IT-led, department-partnered builds with clear ROI, tight scopes, and fast iteration cycles. Rich shares a standout customer story migrating hundreds of integrations off a legacy vendor while launching agentic workflows on a single governed platform—delivering 60% lower integration costs and three times faster builds. Along the way, we explore how engineering teams use AI coding tools to prototype faster and offload grunt work, freeing time for architecture and testing without threatening roles.

If you’re choosing where to start, accelerators for ITSM, HR, support, and knowledge make time-to-value tangible and create a structure teams can adapt to proprietary data and processes. We also cover the growing priority of enterprise governance: controlling which tools agents can access, how data moves, and how identities map across systems. Rich outlines Tray’s Agent Gateway for MCP—adding authentication and permissioning and exposing Trey-built tools to other services in a controlled way—so CIOs can move quickly without giving away the keys to the kingdom.

Ready to move from pilot to production with confidence? Follow, share, and leave a review to tell us where your organization is on the journey—and what’s blocking your next agent from going live.

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