Michael Cordner: Prepping The Enterprise for Agentic AI
Michael Cordner
Estimated read time: 3 min
Last updated: December 18, 2025
In an interview with James Maguire from TechVoices, Jentic CTO and Co-Founder Michael Cordner explained why APIs built for humans rather than machines remain one of the biggest barriers to achieving real ROI from AI.
He detailed how Jentic helps enterprises restructure their API environments so AI agents can operate reliably, safely, and at scale, while avoiding the operational risks of unmanaged agent activity. Cordner also outlined a future built around two complementary classes of agents, underscored the need for centralized observability and governance, and emphasized that enterprise AI is still in its early days—where patience, experimentation, and strong foundations matter more than hype.
Core Insights
Preparing for AI Agents
Jentic prepares enterprises for agentic AI by restructuring APIs and documentation so they are precise, machine-readable, and capable of supporting large numbers of autonomous agents operating at scale.
Significant Complexity
Many organizations underestimate the complexity of AI adoption, assuming systems will “just figure it out.” In reality, poor documentation and fragile infrastructure almost guarantee poor outcomes.
Operational Excellence
True operational excellence requires centralized authentication, observability, and governance. Without these foundations, enterprises risk the emergence of unmonitored “shadow AI” operating outside approved systems.
How to Achieve ROI
Early ROI comes from agentic systems that accelerate workflow creation—similar to how developer tools like Cursor speed up experimentation and business logic development.
Key Quotes
Why Enterprises Struggle With AI Adoption
“APIs and documentation up until now have been built primarily for humans and for developers, and for AI to make sense of it, it needs to be a lot more precise and clear. Most organizations just haven’t had enough time to get their APIs and their landscape to the level where AI can be of use. We want to help enterprises be in that 5% that actually sees ROI from AI rollouts.”
The Hidden Risk of Shadow AI
“If there are thousands of agents hitting infrastructure, where are those agents actually living? In a lot of cases that’s shadow IT. People are putting tokens into skunkworks agents with no traceability. You don’t know what systems they’re accessing. Operational excellence starts with centralized, logged, observable agent use.”
The Real Source of ROI in Agentic AI
“The best use of agents is in situations where you determine how to do something, let the agent experiment until it gets it right, and then capture that as a workflow. I think AI is really going to shine by reading process documents, understanding tasks, and creating business logic far faster than humans can. That’s where ROI will come from.”
The Future: Two Classes of Enterprise Agents
“I think in the future there will be two kinds of agents. One type mines processes—trying things until they work and formalizing workflows. The second type takes vague requests, matches them to those workflows, and executes. It’s a simple loop. And yes, it sounds opinionated, but that’s genuinely how I think applied AI is going to play out.”