Itential Intros FlowAI for Infra Intent and Compliance
Automated orchestration is the holy grail for infrastructure operations, just as it is with most AI-directed products. The challenge for real-world businesses is implementing that orchestration with safety and human-level supervision.
To this end, infrastructure orchestration company Itential has unveiled FlowAI, a new platform for designing and controlling agentic orchestration for infrastructure operations.
This novel product, which is in customer preview, may help define a new category of platform engineering tools that will help enterprises with the daunting task of implementing commercial agentic operations. Agentic orchestration—which means using AI agents to build autonomous workflows and decision making—is all the rage. But governance and safety are big barriers to adoption.
Targeting the “Agentic” Layer
The best way to think of FlowAI is as an infrastructure-specific design and development platform with powerful AI programming and compliance functions. As we described in our Trends and Leaders in Platform Engineering and IaC report, compliance is a huge component of platform engineering.
With FlowAI, Itential has built a platform that brings governance, management, and programmability to the agentic orchestration world. Itential believes that FlowAI will take automation beyond static workflows to a model that blends reasoning and control.
How does it work? Itential says that FlowAI will add a new “agentic layer” to the Itential Platform, using reasoning intelligence and deterministic automation to govern agentic AI operations.
Yes, that’s a lot of buzzwords. Think of it as an abstraction layer on top of infrastructure to help organizations automate, operate, and manage agentic operations. At the same time, the reasoning intelligence can be closely managed for safety and governance.
Through agentic orchestration via Model Context Protocol (MCP) and intelligent workflows, Itential can now connect IT systems, CI/CD pipelines, and network infrastructure. The platform will also use Itential MCP technology to connect to other agentic systems from other vendors, while providing safety and governance guardrails.
The idea of deterministic automation may remind some folks of the movement known as intent-based infrastructure. But intent-based infrastructure, pioneered by companies such as as Apstra (acquired by Juniper, which was acquired by HPE), didn't live up to the hype, largely because it was limited to specific cloud or enterprise datacenter environments, rather than targeting hybrid environments spanning cloud and enterprise private infrastructure.
Multivendor Orchestration
There’s another important challenge with agentic automation. All of the major networking and infrastructure vendors are developing their own agentic AI and orchestration platforms for AIOps. But practitioners might question if there is a way to deliver consistent operations in multivendor environments.
With FlowAI, Itential will enable users to program and control infrastructure from multiple vendors, including major providers such as Cisco. Itential will use MCP and APIs as a linchpin for connecting to other agentic AI services. For example, the Itential platform could leverage an MCP server from Cisco or HPE. Users can build guardrails and programmatic workflows for how these environments are controlled.
“Enterprises are ready to move beyond predefined workflows toward systems that can think, plan, and act responsibly," said Peter Sprygada, Chief Architect at Itential, in the company's statement.
In a call with Futuriom, Sprygada said that AI is a powerful tool, but it needs "secure execution, governance, auditability, and machine-human alignment."
Sprygada says that Itential has long focused on deterministic infrastructure automation, which means a system to produce predictable results with reliability and auditability, such as compliance checks and upgrades. Some AI systems might deviate from a deterministic approach because they are susceptible to inconsistent results and hallucinations. If organizations add AI reasoning to their models, they need to make sure they are monitored and safe.
"Deterministic [orchestration] has been our bread and butter," said Sprygada. "Now we are starting to see how organizations want to add AI reasoning to this model. This gives organizations a governed path to adopt AI safely, bringing intelligence into operations without compromising the visibility, security, and trust that modern infrastructure demands.”
What’s Inside FlowAI
The cool thing about this product is there doesn't seem to be anything like it. Let’s run down all the components of FlowAI.
According to Itential, FlowAI introduces a set of agentic components across the Itential portfolio, which now includes the Itential Platform, Itential Automation Gateway (IAG), and the Itential MCP Server.
Here’s what’s included in FlowAI:
- FlowAgent Builder: A new application within the Itential Platform for creating and governing role-based agents. Developers can define each agent’s purpose, reasoning style, and exact toolset - specifying which Projects, workflows, APIs, and Gateway services they can access.
- FlowAgents: Intelligent, task-oriented agents that reason through goals and execute safely through deterministic workflows and automation assets, ensuring every step remains visible, repeatable, and auditable.
- FlowMCP Gateway: An extension of the Itential Automation Gateway application that allows the platform to securely invoke external infrastructure agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, like Netbox MCP, bringing external intelligence under Itential’s governance.
- FlowMCP Server: The enterprise-grade version of the Itential MCP Server that enables centralized management of multiple MCP instances. It allows teams to create virtual MCP servers with defined personas and access controls, providing scalable, governed connectivity between the Itential Platform and diverse agentic systems.
Together, these components create what Itential calls an "AI-to-Action Continuum," by which reasoning agents can plan, decide, and act, while the platform enforces security, governance, compliance, and deterministic execution.
Itential is now accepting a limited number of enterprise customers into its private customer preview. It has disclosed that communications service provider Lumen is using the product.
Futuriom Take: Itential's FlowAI is an important product release for the industry, addressing some of the limitations of current agentic AI and AIOps initiatives. It delivers intent-based control of hybrid and multivendor environments, as well as important safety and compliance features.
