Trusted Agent Control Plane Providers for Enterprise 2026
The short answer
An agent control plane is the layer that decides which AI agents may exist, what identity they act under, what they may touch and what they may spend. As of October 13, 2026, the trusted enterprise options are:
| Provider | Best for | What it controls | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Agent 365 | Microsoft 365 / Entra estates | Inventory, agent identity (Entra Agent ID), data (Purview), threats (Defender), onboarding templates | $15 per user per month; included in Microsoft 365 E7 ($99/user/month) |
| Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform | Google Cloud and Workspace | Agent identity, Agent Sandbox with its own network boundary, Agent Gateway firewall, real-time spend caps, Smart Routing | Google Cloud consumption |
| AWS Bedrock AgentCore (Identity, Gateway, Policy) | Agents you build and run on AWS | Tool access through Gateway, per-call Cedar policy checks, OAuth to third-party tools, microVM isolation | Pay per use; Identity free via Runtime/Gateway; $200 Free Tier credits for new AWS customers |
| ServiceNow AI Control Tower | Multi-vendor estates | Inventory of any agent, model or MCP server; AI Gateway for MCP traffic; governance tied to IT workflows | Enterprise contract |
| Salesforce AI Control Plane | Agentforce-heavy companies | Registration, identity, policy, lifecycle, evaluation, cost across Salesforce and third-party AI | Rolling out from early FY28 (February 2027) |
This is the enterprise-deployment spoke of our best AI agent control planes ranking. For oversight that deliberately sits outside every cloud, see neutral AI agent oversight platforms.
What “trusted” means in a control plane
Enterprises buying in 2026 ask for five things, and the vendors differ on each:
- Agent identity. Every agent gets its own identity rather than borrowing a human’s. Microsoft uses Entra Agent ID; Google gives coworker agents their own identities and
@agentsmailboxes; AWS uses AgentCore Identity. - Enforced policy at runtime, not just written policy. Google routes all agent traffic — in, out and between agents — through Agent Gateway. AWS Policy checks every tool call that passes through AgentCore Gateway and allows or denies it.
- Inventory. You cannot govern agents you cannot see. Agent 365 lists every agent published through Microsoft 365 channels automatically; agents built elsewhere need extra registration steps. ServiceNow inventories first- and third-party agents, models and MCP servers.
- Spend control. Google lets you set a hard project spend cap in the Cloud Billing console; when it trips, that project’s agents pause and resume with one click.
- Audit trail that security teams already read — Defender and Purview on Microsoft, Cloud audit logs on Google, CloudWatch on AWS.
Picks by situation
You run Microsoft 365: Microsoft Agent 365. It extends tools your admins already use — Defender, Entra, Purview and the Microsoft 365 admin center — to agents, with security policy templates applied at onboarding. Microsoft licenses it per human user who interacts with, owns, manages or sponsors a managed agent, at $15 per user per month, or as part of Microsoft 365 E7 at $99. The work agents do is billed separately through Copilot Studio or Azure.
You run Google Cloud or Workspace: Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. At Gemini at Work on October 8, 2026, Google described the stack: every agent executes inside an Agent Sandbox with its own network boundary, every request crosses Agent Gateway, and policies are written once (“agents may not open documents classified Need to Know”) and enforced in real time. Per-project spend caps make chargeback to departments straightforward. See what Google’s Gemini agent is for the agent itself.
You build your own agents on AWS: Bedrock AgentCore. There is no seat licence. You pay for Gateway operations and for each Policy authorization request; AWS’s own example of 100,000 sessions with five tool calls each comes to 500,000 authorization requests. Policies are Cedar statements, and AgentCore can draft them from plain-language rules at $0.13 per 1,000 input tokens. Identity is free when used through AgentCore Runtime or Gateway.
Your agents come from many vendors: ServiceNow AI Control Tower. ServiceNow expanded it at Knowledge 2026 (May 2026) to discover, observe, govern, secure and measure AI across any enterprise system, and added an AI Gateway with real-time controls for MCP transactions. It is the natural owner when your IT service management already runs on ServiceNow.
You live in Salesforce: plan for the AI Control Plane, use Agent Fabric now. Salesforce announced the AI Control Plane with its Trusted Enterprise AI Harness in September 2026. It covers discovery, registration, identity, policy, lifecycle, evaluation, observation and cost across Salesforce and third-party AI, but the unified experience only begins rolling out in early fiscal 2028. Until then, the shipping pieces are MuleSoft Agent Fabric and the existing Agentforce governance tools.
How to choose in three questions
- Where do most agents run? If 80% sit in one cloud or suite, buy that vendor’s control plane first; native identity and billing controls are worth more than neutrality.
- Do agents cross vendors? If yes, add a neutral inventory (ServiceNow, or the options in our neutral-platform page) rather than trying to make one cloud govern another.
- Who pays? Per-user licensing (Microsoft) is predictable but scales with headcount; consumption pricing (AWS, Google) scales with agent activity. Model a month of real traffic before signing.
Last verified: October 13, 2026.