Overview
IntelliTect collaborated with a leading utility technology company to architect and prototype a shared platform enabling teams across the organization to create and run agentic workflows in a standardized way. The engagement addressed growing fragmentation as multiple teams independently built their own AI agent solutions. IntelliTect provided architectural guidance and built a working prototype over a focused 6-week engagement, validating a novel zero-trust, platform-agnostic approach and establishing a clear path toward productization.
Challenges
Teams across the organization were independently building their own AI agent solutions, leading to fragmentation, inconsistency, and duplicated effort. The client needed a centralized platform that conformed to company-wide standards, offered shared tools, and provided an easy onramp for teams, all while remaining platform-agnostic.
A critical technical constraint was that the platform could not hold any security keys for individual teams. It needed to operate as an agnostic harness, passing authentication tokens from the caller through to tools without requiring its own service principal to have access to team-owned resources. This demanded a zero-trust pass-through authentication model that preserved each team’s security boundaries.
Solution
IntelliTect collaborated with the client’s technical leads to design and prototype a platform where agent definitions are authored in YAML and agent runs are triggered, monitored, and managed through platform-owned API endpoints. Teams can incorporate MCP tools, both team-owned and shared, with authentication tokens passed through from the triggering API call using a zero-trust model. The platform itself holds no security keys for individual teams, acting as an agnostic harness. Built on Kubernetes with a PostgreSQL backing store for durability, the prototype validated the architectural approach and established a clear foundation for full productization.
Technical Approach and Architecture:
The architecture centers on a zero-trust pass-through authentication model. The platform acts as an agnostic harness that passes auth tokens from the caller through to tools, without requiring its own service principal to have access to team-owned resources.
Agent definitions are authored in YAML, providing a declarative, version-controllable format for workflow configuration. Agent runs are triggered, monitored, and managed via platform-owned API endpoints. Teams can include MCP tools, both team-owned and shared, giving them flexibility while maintaining platform-level consistency.
The platform runs on Kubernetes for orchestration and scalability, with PostgreSQL as the backing store for durability. For the initial iteration, Microsoft Foundry was used for model hosting, though the architecture is intentionally model-agnostic, allowing teams to use different model providers without platform changes. IntelliTect collaborated on the architecture with the client’s technical leads, provided advisory guidance, and built the prototype to validate the approach.
Technologies Used
C#, Microsoft Agent Framework, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Foundry (initial model hosting; architecture is model-agnostic), YAML (agent definitions), MCP tools
Outcome
The working prototype validated the architectural approach, including the zero-trust pass-through authentication model. The engagement established a clear path forward to productization of the shared agentic workflows platform. The 6-week engagement was completed by a team of 2 IntelliTect engineers.
Does Your Organization Need a Similar Solution?
Let’s chat about how we can help you achieve excellence on your next project!