AI Agent
Agent runtimes, tool calling, MCP, memory, planning, and multi-agent orchestration.
Stack position
Where AI Agent sits in the AI stack
L14 · AI Platform
MLOps/LLMOps, model gateways, evaluation, and deployment tooling.
L15 · AI Agent
Agent runtimes, tool calling, MCP, memory, planning, and multi-agent orchestration.
L16 · AI Security
Model, data, prompt, agent, and identity security plus governance — spans the whole stack.
L17 · Enterprise AI
Copilots and workflow automation replacing part of the work, not just assisting it.
Icons mark layer roles — not company logos. Position only; not a price chart.
Why this layer matters
The shift from answering to acting. An agent plans, calls tools, holds memory and operates systems — which turns tool protocols, runtimes and observability into infrastructure rather than features.
What is the bottleneck?
Reliability, not capability. An agent that succeeds most of the time is not deployable for anything with consequences.
A structural observation about supplier concentration and lead times — not a view on any security.
Who sits in this layer?
No public companies are listed here because the pure plays in this layer are still private. Public exposure to it runs through the diversified companies that fund and distribute them, which this map already places in their own layers.
Coverage boundary
Coverage boundary: US-listed tickers or ADRs only (same rule as TSM / ASML). Important suppliers without a US listing are omitted even when they matter to the stack. That is a coverage rule, not a quality ranking.
No hand-listed notable omissions for this layer yet. The US-list / ADR rule still applies.
Checked 2026-10-09. Not exhaustive.
Same track
Descriptive positioning only. The positioning label says whether a company's business is exposed to a layer, never whether to buy it. Layers with no exposure are not recommendations to add any.