President's Letter: A Year of Change and Growth

A year ago, we laid out one of the most ambitious evolutions in the history of the MACH Alliance. We believed the agentic era would make what we do more valuable, not less – and the principles we stand for more relevant. We believed enterprises would not be powered by one agent, or even hundreds, but by thousands of specialized agents working across vendors, systems, and organizational boundaries.

On October 30, 2025, we backed that belief with action: over 90 technology companies stood together and committed to build one of the world's first true Agent Ecosystems. We did it because the coming Internet of Agents would not — and should not — belong to a single vendor, platform, or model. Enterprises need the freedom to assemble the technologies and intelligence best suited to their needs, even as agents need to discover one another, exchange context, establish trust, and work together across the boundaries between experience, customer data, and commerce. No one company could build that future alone, so we said we would build it together.

As the year progressed, belief became certainty. Leading brands adopted agentic AI at a breakneck clip, and by April, we had confirmation from the analysts: Gartner predicted that “by 2028, an average global Fortune 500 enterprise will have over 150,000 agents in use.”

At that scale, AI stops being a model problem. It becomes an ecosystem problem. A trust problem. A security problem. And fundamentally, a composability problem. The technology changed this year; our mission didn't. And the need for it only grew.

The Community Led

It's been a year since the Alliance began moving in this direction, and what's stood out is that you didn't wait for us – you set the path.

The Alliance Board never issued an edict telling members to reinvent their products, invest in AI, develop agents, or rethink their data architectures. It wasn't necessary – you were already doing it. Across this ecosystem, hundreds of millions of dollars in innovation and go-to-market investment are reshaping cloud, data, payments, commerce, and digital experience. Our role has been to recognize that momentum, articulate what connects it, and help all of us accomplish together what would be much harder alone.

Over the past year, that ambition has become an ecosystem:

• More than 40 member organizations have qualified for the Agent Ready Award, establishing an independent signal of real agentic capability.
• We launched MACH Connect in partnership with Crossbeam, accelerating lead sharing and joint go-to-market amongst 80+ of our membership.
• We've formed Agent Ecosystem working groups, bringing together leaders across commerce, customer data, digital experience, cloud, and data infrastructure.
• Through the MACH AI Exchange, members are moving beyond discussion to multi-vendor experimentation, enterprise use cases, and reference architectures.
• We've deepened collaboration with hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud (GCP), standards bodies like Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), emerging protocols like Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A), Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and open-source initiatives, like AGNTCY – adopting good work wherever it originates rather than inventing another standard simply because we can.
• We've expanded our community through the Collaborator category, bringing important new voices and capabilities into the work.
• And we're addressing the human side of this transformation through Change Agents – because making technology agentic is only half the challenge; organizations, workflows, and people must change with it.

The Evidence is Catching Up with the Conviction

Perhaps the most encouraging development this year is that we’re increasingly able to measure what this community has long believed.

Our latest Enterprise Research Report provides striking evidence:

Organizations building on the foundations we advocate are seeing a 6× difference in AI ROI. The MACH Alliance Enterprise Technology Report surveyed 600 enterprise technology decision-makers across seven global markets and grouped organizations by how far along they are with MACH architecture, from early planning to fully implemented and scaled. Among those with fully implemented, scaled MACH architecture, 78% report clear evidence of ROI on AI investments, compared to 13% still in early planning. Fully implemented, scaled MACH architecture gives AI better data accessibility, more operational efficiency, and faster deployment – which is what turns AI investment into measurable return. In addition, 99% of respondents see measurable results from AI – averaging four distinct ROI outcomes per organization.

This matters. Open, Composable and Connected isn’t simply an architectural preference – it’s increasingly becoming an economic advantage. And I have no doubt it will become an economic imperative for enterprises in the not-too-distant future.

Enterprises need trusted data. They need systems that expose capabilities cleanly. They need the freedom to connect new technologies without rebuilding everything around them. And they need architectures capable of changing at roughly the speed at which AI itself is changing.

The foundations this community have spent years establishing aren’t being superseded by AI. AI is revealing why they mattered all along.

2026: At a Glance

There is much more behind these numbers, but they give a sense of what this community has accomplished:

• 250K+ practitioners across our member organizations
• 8000+ of leading enterprises engaged through our community
• 1500+ practitioners trained or certified
• 120+ member organizations
• 80+ brand ambassadors
• 50 events, labs and community sessions worldwide
• 43 working-group contributors
• 42 Agent Ready organizations
• 28 new members and Collaborators in the past year
• 6× difference in AI ROI associated with the foundations we advocate

Behind every number are members, Ambassadors, enterprise leaders and practitioners who chose to contribute. That is the real scale of the MACH Alliance.

We are member-driven, enterprise-informed and practitioner-built – connected to thousands of brands and hundreds of thousands of people working across the organizations that make up this ecosystem.

The Mission Ahead

For everything that has evolved over the past year, what we stand for has become clearer.

Open. Composable. Connected.

We believe enterprises should maintain independence and choice as technology evolves.

We believe the agentic enterprise must not become the next walled garden.

We believe interoperability and trust must be built in before fragmentation becomes entrenched.

We believe this community has a unique opportunity to build the leading Agent Ecosystem for commerce, customer data, and digital experience, and to be a force for positive change for the organizations and people navigating this transformation.

Thank You

As our members cast their votes this week in our Board elections, I want this letter to end where it should: with gratitude.

Thank you to our members.

Thank you to our Ambassadors.

Thank you to the enterprises that challenge us.

Thank you to everyone participating in working groups, building proofs, establishing standards, teaching others and contributing ideas.

Thank you to our team and Board.

And above all, thank you to the hundreds of thousands of practitioners represented across this community who are actually building the future we’re talking about.

None of us invented MACH alone, and none of us will build what comes next alone.

The Alliance’s job is to connect the energy, the passion, and the capability each of you brings to bear and align it around a common purpose, making what we can accomplish together far greater than what any one of us could accomplish alone. And we intend to keep pushing.

In the coming weeks, I’ll write again with The Horizon Ahead, our view of what we’ve learned from this year, what we believe comes next, and the commitments we’re prepared to make as we approach MACH X: Amsterdam.

For today, though, this is about reflecting on what has already been accomplished, and how far we’ve already come. Look at what you’ve built.

Thank you for an incredible year,

Jason Cottrell
President, MACH Alliance
Chair & CEO, Orium