Patrick Burger

As enterprises begin deploying AI agents at scale, agent sprawl is inevitable. Without governance infrastructure, unmanaged autonomy cascades: agents cannot reliably discover existing tools, so teams unknowingly rebuild functionality; data quality drifts between systems; conflicting decisions emerge; lineage goes missing; and hallucinated actions execute at machine speed, before any human can audit or stop them. A governance nightmare. In this talk, we show how a self‑service event streaming platform provides the missing foundation to govern multi‑agent systems. Event stream processing delivers real‑time aggregation, explicit data contracts, and end‑to‑end observability - so agents can reason in a clean, auditable state instead of ad‑hoc APIs and shadow IT. Our position: taming this sprawl does not require a new AI stack. It requires treating your existing event streaming platform as governance infrastructure. At E.ON / Essent, we're building a self‑service streaming platform on top of Confluent Cloud for enterprise AI operations. Key capabilities – EventCatalog for discovery, Flink for real‑time aggregation, and validation gates – are proving essential for agent governance. The…