Story thread · 3 reports / 2 sources

As enterprises confront AI agent sprawl, xpander wants them to own their own control and context layer

venturebeat.com · 2h · first reportShare

Enterprise AI has a new infrastructure problem: companies are accumulating agents faster than they are developing systems to govern them. Gartner estimates that the average global Fortune 500 company will have more than 150,000 AI agents in use by 2028, up from fewer than 15 in 2025. Yet only 13% of organizations believe they currently have the right AI agent governance in place, according to the research firm. That widening gap is creating a market for infrastructure that sits above individual models and agents — handling execution, permissions, observability, memory, access to enterprise systems and lifecycle management without forcing developers to reconstruct those services for every new agent. xpander.ai , a startup founded by three former AWS principal engineers, is the latest company trying to own that layer. The company is making its enterprise AI agent platform generally available today , positioning it as a vendor-neutral control plane for building, running and governing agen