Agents Are Just ESBs With Better Compilers

Agents Are Just ESBs With Better Compilers

For anyone who lived through BizTalk, ESBs, SOA, or enterprise integration platforms, the current excitement around agents, orchestrators, and AI pipelines feels… oddly familiar.

New names.

New tools.

New hype.

Same shape.

This article is not anti-AI. It’s not cynical.

It’s architectural memory.

The truth is simple:

Agents are not a new paradigm.

They are ESBs with better compilers.

A Short Memory Problem in Tech

Every generation of tooling claims to be a clean break from the past.

But integration has laws — and those laws don’t care about branding.

Twenty years ago, enterprises struggled with:

• Disconnected systems

• Mismatched data formats

• Fragile point-to-point integrations

• Manual transformations

• Operational blind spots

The solution back then was the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Today, enterprises struggle with:

• Disconnected services

• Mismatched schemas

• Fragile pipelines

• Prompt-generated glue code

• Agent sprawl

The solution today is… agents and orchestrators.

Different interface.

Same problem.

What an ESB Actually Was (Not the Marketing Version)

Strip away the tooling and vendor decks, and an ESB did five things:

1. Ingest messages

   
   

   Files, queues, APIs, events

2. Normalize data

   
   

   Canonical models (usually XML)

3. Transform

   
   

   XSLT, maps, enrichments

4. Route & orchestrate

   
   

   Conditional flows, long-running processes

5. Enforce policy

   
   

   Validation, security, retries, monitoring

That wasn’t hype.

That was real, necessary work.

Why ESBs Made So Much Money

ESBs were expensive not because vendors were evil, but because:

• Integration lives in the cracks

• No two enterprises are the same

• The last 20% is always custom

• Failure modes matter more than happy paths

Complexity = margin.

And ESBs sat right at the center of that complexity.

Why ESBs Fell Out of Favor

They didn’t fail technically.

They failed organizationally.

The Four ESB Sins

1. Centralization

   
   

   • One bus

   • One team

   • Everyone blocked on everyone else

2. 
   

3. Over-engineering

   
   

   • Simple calls required schemas, maps, pipelines, deployments

4. 
   

5. Vendor lock-in

   
   

   • Proprietary tooling

   • Expensive licenses

   • Slow evolution

6. 
   

7. The XML tax

   
   

   • Verbose

   • Brittle

   • Hard to debug

8. 
   

Developers didn’t reject the problem ESBs solved.

They rejected the experience.

The Microservices “Revolution” (Which Was a Reorganization)

Microservices didn’t remove ESB responsibilities.

They redistributed them.

ESB Capability

Where It Went

Transport

API gateways

Routing

Service mesh

Transformation

Application code

Orchestration

Workflow engines

Governance

CI/CD + policy

Monitoring

Observability stacks

The bus didn’t disappear.

It shattered.

Enter Agents and Orchestrators

Now we’re here.

Agents today:

• Ingest data

• Normalize it

• Transform it

• Route it

• Apply rules

• Retry on failure

• Emit artifacts

They just do it with:

• Python instead of XML

• Prompts instead of XSLT

• Tools instead of adapters

• DAGs instead of visual designers

That’s not a revolution.

That’s a compiler upgrade.

The One-to-One Mapping Nobody Talks About

ESB Era

Agent Era

Canonical XML

Typed Python / JSON

XSLT maps

Prompt + transform

Adapters

Tools

Orchestration designer

DAGs / flows

Rules engine

Policy prompts

BAM

Logs & traces

Admin console

Dashboards

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Why This Time

Feels

Different

Two things actually changed:

1.

The Compiler Got Smarter

LLMs can now:

• Generate mappings

• Draft policies

• Suggest flows

• Glue systems together faster

They don’t remove complexity.

They accelerate its creation.

2.

The Cost of Entry Dropped

• Python instead of proprietary tooling

• Open source instead of licenses

• Cloud instead of servers

That’s good.

It’s also dangerous.

The New Risk: Invisible ESBs

Classic ESBs were visible.

You knew where the bus was.

Agent systems are:

• Distributed

• Implicit

• Prompt-driven

• Harder to audit

Which leads to a dangerous illusion:

“It’s just some scripts and agents.”

No.

It’s an integration platform — whether you admit it or not.

The Hard Truth

Integration complexity is conserved.

You can move it:

• From design time to run time

• From humans to machines

• From centralized to distributed

But you cannot eliminate it.

Agents don’t reduce the need for:

• Canonical thinking

• Policy

• Ownership

• Accountability

They increase the need, because things move faster.

Why This Matters Now

Enterprises are rebuilding ESBs:

• Without calling them ESBs

• Without acknowledging the history

• Without learning from the failures

That’s how you repeat mistakes at cloud scale.

What a “Better ESB” Actually Looks Like

Not a product.

A posture.

• Intent before orchestration

• Policy before automation

• Evidence before reasoning

• Governance without gatekeeping

• Memory without central choke points

This is why TeamBrain-style thinking matters.

Not because it’s new —

but because it remembers what the industry forgot.

Final Thought

Agents are not replacing ESBs.

They are inheriting their responsibility.

The winners won’t be the ones who build the most agents.

They’ll be the ones who understand:

• When not to automate

• Where to draw boundaries

• How to govern without suffocating teams

That’s not hype.

That’s architecture.