Merge API Inc., a platform provider delivering connective infrastructure for artificial intelligence to business data and tools, launched Agent Handler for Employees, easing the strain on information technology teams.

With today’s release, Merge is offering a product that connects to identity providers, imports employees and groups, maps them to approved tools and actions across AI vendors, and applies data loss prevention and logging controls for every employee session.

This provides a necessary control layer that gives IT teams a safety net, allowing employees to connect to approved tools while management can be sure the situation is “handled.” Previously, employees were more likely to bring their own tools or call upon external models and services, creating unregulated AI use inside the enterprise. In regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and government agencies, that could be disastrous.

“Agent Handler for Employees makes it really easy for businesses to unleash unlimited tools across their employee base and know that they’re doing it securely,” co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Gil Feig told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

Merge began by solving a familiar business-to-business software-as-a-service problem: Companies had to integrate with every major application in a category because each customer used a different stack. Feig said that experience became unexpectedly relevant once generative AI took off.

As AI companies began competing on enterprise context rather than just model access, Merge’s integration layer became a way to feed AI systems the business data they needed. The company then moved from static integrations toward live, Model Context Protocol-style tool access that agents could use “on the fly.”

Feig separated the market into companies that have let employees connect to a multitude of tools and those that have locked everything down — that is, regulated industries. Banks and similar organizations may want the productivity gains of agentic AI, but they cannot let every employee connect agents freely to enterprise systems.

Many of these institutions resolve this by putting agents into internal systems that can access only internal resources and have no way of reaching the outside world. They get the benefits of an AI agent but avoid many of the downsides. However, that also cuts the agent off at the knees.

“Your agent in isolation is not hard,” Feig said. “If you have your agent locked in a basement, you know, air-gapped, it can do no harm, but it also can’t do that much good, right?”

Merge’s platform, now with Agent Handler for Employees, offers an alternative that allows agents to connect safely to employee third-party tools, acting like a gatekeeper that keeps an eye on everything that passes through. It keeps IT in the loop and lets security maintain policies on AI queries, prompts and data flows. It can filter, log or restrict proprietary information from leaving the company firewall. IT, security, management and employees can all be happy, Feig said.

Merge already serves major customers using the system, including companies in regulated industries and within AI itself. Perplexity AI Inc. uses the “connective tissue” of Agent Handler, the company’s base product, to spin up data connectors for customers faster within the company’s enterprise solution.

“I wouldn’t say that we necessarily want to be like an agent-building platform, we want to be the everything you need but the agent platform,” Feig said.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer