The Future Will Not Be One: MACH’s Next Chapter in the Agentic Era
How the MACH Alliance’s next chapter, led by incoming President Jason Cottrell, is shaping an open, multi-agent future for enterprise AI.
Five years ago, the MACH Alliance gave enterprises something they hadn’t had in decades: choice. It pushed back against the promise of all-in-one platforms and proved that openness, interoperability, and composability could deliver faster innovation and real business results.
Now, as AI reshapes the digital landscape, the movement that made composability mainstream is evolving again, and the Alliance finds itself leading a second revolution: keeping the AI era open.
Stepping into that challenge is Jason Cottrell, recently named President of the MACH Alliance and Founder & CEO of Orium. “The Alliance in its early days was advocating something that was pretty new,” he says. “But composability wasn’t the destination, it was the foundation.”
The next phase of digital business, Cottrell believes, will be built on many agents working together, not a single “intelligent” platform. Under his leadership, the Alliance aims to be the force behind an agentic ecosystem where specialized agents, not monolithic systems, drive growth.
“I think what's really exciting now is that, because we have so many innovative and pioneering members, we’re on the forefront of this next wave of innovation,” adds Cottrell. “The challenge and the opportunity we have is to harness that as a collective, to bring that same ethos of composability to this new challenge so it works proactively for businesses and their customers.”
From advocacy to assembly
The first era of MACH was about advocacy—proving that modular, open, and API-driven technologies could outperform monolithic suites—and that message landed. Today, composability has undeniably gone mainstream. The next chapter is about assembly: building the connective tissue that makes composability easier to adopt, and faster to prove out.
“Our goal is to galvanize members through funded programs that drive proactive collaboration— pre-integrating, productizing, and proving solutions so customers can turn them on with confidence,” explains Cottrell. “That collective action is how we’ll drive lasting impact. With more than 120 member companies and 250,000 employees represented, there’s simply no other organization operating at this scale in our space.”
It’s a subtle but significant shift: from convincing enterprises that composability is the right idea, to helping them realize it with less friction and more certainty.
Composability as the foundation for what’s next
Of course, the narrative of “one system to rule them all” never truly disappears. The industry is already seeing a new wave of vendors promising all-in-one AI suites that claim to handle every business need. Cottrell is unconvinced.
“There is a degree to which the enemy has returned,” he notes with a grin, referring to the everlasting allure of the monolith. “But it’s not going to be one agent that runs your business. It’s going to be many agents running many parts of your business.”
For Cottrell and the Alliance, composability is the foundation for the agentic future. “The notion of agents, very simply put, is systems that are executing with some autonomy to achieve a goal,” he says.
Instead of people directing every action through prompts or interfaces, enterprises will embed intelligence directly into operations with agents that handle specific domains, connect data in real time, and collaborate with one another to achieve outcomes.
But none of that works without composability. Modular architectures, clean APIs, and interoperable standards are what allow those agents to plug in, share context, and remain observable. “The foundations of MACH,” Cottrell says, “are what ‘ready’ looks like for the agentic era.”
That belief—in the power of many specialized, interoperable agents—echoes MACH’s founding purpose. What composability did for enterprise software, multi-agent design will now do for AI: create flexibility, reduce vendor lock-in, and accelerate time to value.
And the data supports it: research from the MACH Alliance shows that enterprises embracing composability and MACH principles are twice as likely to succeed with AI initiatives compared to those that haven’t.
MACH X: Turning theory into practice
That commitment came to life in London at MACH X: Creating the AI-Ready Enterprise, the Alliance’s inaugural event held October 21–22. The two-day forum gathered C-level executives, technology strategists, and architects to share lessons and define practical next steps for operationalizing AI.
“MACH X proved what makes the Alliance unique,” says Cottrell. “There’s widespread agreement on what AI will deliver, but the real gap lies in how. The Alliance exists to close that gap by translating theoretical possibilities into practical solutions— frameworks, standards, and real-world proof points that enterprises can actually use.”
That “how” is already taking shape through the MACH AI Exchange, a peer network powered by Bloomreach that turns collaboration into production-ready solutions. The first wave of Exchange projects tackled pressing enterprise problems, demonstrating what cross-vendor collaboration can achieve in practice:
- B2B Wholesale Agentic AI, an assistant that completes wholesale orders through natural conversation.
- B2C Cross-Brand AI Promotion, which uses AI to deliver seamless cross-brand product placements inside a House of Brands.
- Fraud Detection AI, an autonomous agent already in use at Baerskin that identifies fraudulent listings, cutting detection time by up to 75 percent.
- AI Migration Documentation, which applies the MACH Open Data Model to automate change-management documentation and recommendations.
Each reinforces the Alliance’s belief that AI success depends on technologies working together across vendors and enterprises as part of a coordinated ecosystem. The results, built with contributors including AWS, commercetools, Conscia, Netlify, Voucherify, Vercel and more, will be available for public use by mid-November.
From talk to action
Cottrell’s presidency carries a clear mandate: move from advocacy to tangible outcomes. “It has to be about vision, and it has to be about action,” he says. “Not talking in theory, but building active pre-integrations and functionality among our members.”
That shift includes deeper coordination across standards bodies, hyperscale partners, and the Alliance’s own community. Expanded representation from brand ambassadors and enterprise members on the board gives practitioners a stronger voice in defining what “good” looks like for AI-driven architectures.
“The ambassadors have always been a strength of this community,” he noted. “We’re launching new programs to keep them engaged and have them play a much larger role in shaping what good looks like.”
What “good” looks like in the next 12 months
Cottrell expects progress to be measured by tangible, operational wins. “The groups who are most successful aren’t just digitizing processes anymore,” he says. ”They’re actively thinking about how to compose systems, agents, and people.”
Success will look like automation first, with humans guiding and supervising; processes redesigned around outcomes instead of steps; and agentic capabilities embedded where they create value.
Organizations with composable foundations will move fastest, testing specialized agents without replatforming, applying consistent governance across systems, and scaling what works. For them, MACH isn’t something to move past— it’s the structure that allows experimentation without chaos.
Beyond efficiency: building the next advantage
Cottrell points out that efficiency isn’t the goal, it’s the cost of entry. “There’s something core to your competitive advantage that has been unassailable to date, but which has just gone away,” he says, citing Wharton professor Ethan Mollick. “And there’s something your customers have always wanted that’s now possible. Our job as leaders is to figure out what each of those things are before our competitors do.”
The organizations that thrive, he says, will be the ones that use automation to fund reinvention, applying agentic systems to create new experiences, new buying journeys, and new business models. That’s where the next ten to twenty years of advantage will be earned.
The future will not be one
Cottrell doesn’t mince words about the Alliance’s guiding philosophy. “We’ve tried to capture the notion that the future will not be one,” he says. “If we do this right, brands will have thousands of options for agents to deploy, reasonably configurable and interoperable in a massive number of combinations to meet their needs.”
It’s a fitting rallying cry for an organization that once proved modular software could outperform the monolith. The mission now is to do the same for AI: ensure that the agentic future is open, composable, and governed by many, not owned by one.
Because the next era of digital business won’t be defined by a single platform, system, or model. It will be defined by how well we compose them, together.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.