The transition to an ‘Agentic Enterprise,’ where humans and AI agents work together, is gaining momentum as organisations in Singapore currently use an average of 12 agents with the number projected to climb 58% within two years.
However, Singapore IT leaders face looming orchestration and governance challenges: 50% of agents currently operate in isolated silos versus part of a multi-agent system, resulting in disconnected workflows, redundant automations, and the potential risk of shadow AI.
The data is based on information from the 100 IT leaders in Singapore.
Salesforce’, in collaboration with Vanson Bourne and with insights from Deloitte Digital, prepared a report using survey data from interviews with 1,050 IT leaders across the globe.
This was conducted between October and November 2025 across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. All respondents work at an enterprise organization (defined as having at least 1,000 employees) in the public or private sector.
To address these issues, the research also uncovered that respondents are turning to API-driven architectures as a unified foundation to connect, orchestrate, and govern multi-agents and drive AI success.
As adoption hits critical mass, AI agents are no longer experimental — they are becoming the primary driver of enterprise productivity. Singapore IT leaders are focused on using diverse agentic solutions and establishing agent communication protocols to manage their fleet of agents.
Among them, 98% say agents already have improved or that they expect them to improve employee experiences, and 95% believe they will free developers to focus on higher-value work.
On average, organisations report that their existing AI agents were developed through various methods, split across prebuilt SaaS agents (35%); embedded agents within enterprise platforms (32%) and; custom-built in-house (33%).
As organisations deploy AI agents, they are actively supporting, or planning to support, a range of standards or protocols to manage and connect them, with high levels of interest in agent communication protocol (49%); agent network protocol (46%); agent-to-agent protocol (44%); model context protocol (42%) and; universal tool calling protocol (35%).
A critical orchestration and governance gap is emerging as enterprises race to deploy AI agents everywhere. While adoption is high, the infrastructure supporting it needs to be more integrated to support a multi-agent workforce that can collaborate and securely leverage data from across the enterprise.
Singapore enterprises are using 1,002 applications on average with only 27% of them integrated together. With integration challenges and agent silos, 92% of IT leaders are concerned that agents will introduce more complexity than value.
The primary challenges currently hamper agentic transformation are integrating siloed apps and data (45%) resources and budget allocation (44%) and; legacy infrastructure or system incompatibility (43%).
In Singapore, 98% of organisations experience barriers to using data for AI use cases, with 41% identifying outdated IT architecture/infrastructure due to data silos/disconnected systems as a top blocker.
Also, 62% of organisations cite cross-application data governance as a top integration challenge. An estimated 31% of APIs are currently ungoverned, on average, and only half of organisations have a centralised governance framework with formal oversight for their agentic capabilities.
A unified foundation
To bridge the integration gaps, Singapore IT leaders are moving toward a unified foundation. By using APIs as the “connective tissue,” organisations can transform fragmented AI tools into a cohesive, multi-agent system where agents can safely communicate, share data context, and execute tasks across the entire IT estate.
Among Singapore IT leaders, 96% agree that AI agent success depends on seamless data integration across all systems.
Further, 97% of IT leaders agree that AI agent success will require IT architecture to become more API-driven, where APIs are fundamental building blocks for connecting applications, data, and AI across an enterprise.
One-third (33%) of teams are already leveraging APIs to speed up integration across systems.
In addition, 45% of Singapore organisations are already using APIs to connect and govern AI today.
“The most critical challenge facing organisations today isn’t access to AI, but converting that intelligence into real work. Agents can only be as effective as the data and business logic they’re grounded in, and with half of all agents currently operating in isolated silos, that context is fragmented,” said Gavin Barfield, VP and CTO of solutions at Salesforce ASEAN.
“For organisations moving into the multi-agent era, this is where the real opportunity lies – those that invest in orchestration to connect, govern, and coordinate agents across the enterprise are the ones that will move beyond disconnected pilots to become a genuine agentic enterprise,” said Barfield.
Kurt Anderson, managing director and API transformation leader at Deloitte Consulting, said that by establishing API-driven guardrails, enterprises can ensure their agentic transformation is ready for the demands of the modern enterprise.
