Tray.ai Inc., the maker of a cloud-based, composable software integration platform, today is embellishing its Merlin Intelligence artificial intelligence development platform with features for building agents.

Those autonomous systems can make decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals or tasks without direct human or programmatic oversight. The company is also bundling a set of prepackaged agent templates for knowledge retrieval, information technology service management and customer support ticketing.

The company cited a recent Gartner Inc. forecast that at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously with agentic AI by 2028, up from none today. Tray.ai said data and tool siloes, along with fragmented governance, are frustrating enterprise AI automation initiatives. It released its own survey that found that 42% of enterprise technology leaders need access to eight or more sources to deploy AI agents successfully and 90% need to integrate with internal systems.

The company is leveraging its integration expertise – it boasts a library of more than 700 connectors to packaged and software-as-a-service products – and low-code tooling to simplify agent development. Tray said customers can also easily build their own connectors.

“We support every major AI service and vendor,” said Rich Waldron, Tray’s co-founder and chief executive. “We’ve also built a suite of native vector database services and provide our own in-app connectors that carry out AI functions.”

Workflow-based

The Merlin Agent Builder (pictured) provides a guided setup incorporating visual workflow-based tools that define each agent’s capabilities and scope, including governance and integration points. IT organizations can build and deploy conversational agents throughout their companies using Microsoft Corp. Teams and Salesforce Inc.’s Slack while maintaining control of data access and permissions. Tray said agents can be audited down to the individual interaction level.

“There’s a low-code studio within the browser that allows you to construct workflows to build an application,” Waldron said. “You can connect to any different service that you wish. You can move data in any way that you like. You can do things like looping and branching. All the tools someone who writes would need are packaged in a way that can be done visually in a low-code manner.”

Tray said organizations have complete control of retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, systems or data events that invoke agents, as well as chat interfaces used to interact with them. They can also tokenize sensitive data and test any execution point and state directly within Tray Build using a connector called Guardian to identify and automatically tokenize sensitive data.

“It gives you an extra layer of control beyond what comes out of the box from the vendors,” Waldon said. Step isolation pulls execution data for targeted testing, so users can save or discard changes instantly and update output schemas accordingly. Agents can autonomously validate file structures and extract text from documents to create structured records from unstructured files.

Waldron said Tray agents meet the definition of agentic AI by being able to make decisions and take actions based on available workflows. “You could build an IT service agent that responds to a request for access control or other simple IT challenges,” he said. “When the prompt is received, Tray figures out which workflows or tools it has access to, which decisions it’s allowed to carry out and carries out the action.”

The product’s composable architecture separates functionality from specific services. “If you decide to change to a different vendor, you don’t have to rewrite the integration,” Waldron said. “You simply go into the workflow, switch out the vendor and redo the mappings.”

Agents can also be trained to solve problems if tools are workflows unavailable. “We’ve built a huge map of connectors and logic that allow you to figure out different ways to do things,” he said. “It’s meant to mimic how an engineer would solve a problem in a way that makes the most sense for your organization.”

The software-as-a-service platform is available immediately.

Image: Tray.ai