Executive deck

Notices and about the author

Endnotes

The deck and the handbook share one endnote list, numbered in order of first citation in the handbook. It is in Appendix B of the handbook, with links. Vendor-authored or sponsored sources are cited for product facts and framing, not as independent validation. Survey figures are self-reported.

Notices and disclosures

Copyright and license. © 2026 John Fisher. This deck is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. You may copy and share it, in whole or in part, without changes and for non-commercial purposes, if you credit John Fisher and link to the license. Suggested credit: John Fisher, The AI Control Plane: Executive Briefing (2026), CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The license covers John Fisher’s own text and figures; it does not cover trademarks, the icons and typeface credited below, or the quotations, data and other material of the sources cited, which belong to their owners.

Additional permission for the slide downloads. In addition to the license, and without changing it, John Fisher permits you to adapt the one-slide PowerPoint files offered with this deck. You may edit, shorten, translate or restyle the slides and their speaker notes, combine them with your own slides, and present and share the adapted slides inside your organization or with clients, including in paid work, provided each adapted slide, or the presentation that contains it, carries this credit: “Adapted from The AI Control Plane: Executive Briefing by John Fisher, used with his permission.” This permission does not cover selling the slides or publishing changed versions of them, for example on a website or a slide-sharing service. The license’s disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability apply to this permission too.

Disclosure. John Fisher works for Salesforce. He wrote this deck independently, on his own time and not as part of his work at Salesforce, using only public information. The views in it are his own, not those of Salesforce or any other company named, and it is not sponsored or endorsed by Salesforce or any of them.

Trademarks. Salesforce, Agentforce, Data 360, MuleSoft, MuleSoft Agent Fabric, CloudHub, Runtime Fabric, Omni Gateway, Slack and Informatica are trademarks of Salesforce, Inc. or its affiliates. Other Salesforce, MuleSoft and Informatica product names may also be trademarks of Salesforce, Inc. or its affiliates. SAP and SAP S/4HANA are the trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE or its affiliates in Germany and in other countries. Microsoft, Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Agent 365, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Teams are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Amazon, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Amazon Bedrock, AgentCore and AWS Step Functions are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Google, Google Cloud, Gemini and Vertex AI are trademarks of Google LLC. Anthropic and Claude are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC. OpenAI is a trademark of OpenAI. Snowflake is a trademark of Snowflake Inc. Workday is a trademark of Workday, Inc. Databricks is a trademark of Databricks, Inc. Kong is a trademark of Kong Inc. Cloudflare is a trademark of Cloudflare, Inc. Cisco is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. LangGraph is a trademark of LangChain Inc. Airbyte is a trademark of Airbyte, Inc. Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix, Inc. SWIFT is a trademark of S.W.I.F.T. SC. CUSIP is a registered trademark of the American Bankers Association. OpenTelemetry and SPIFFE are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. OWASP is a registered trademark of the OWASP Foundation, Inc. MITRE and MITRE ATLAS are trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Rust is a trademark of the Rust Foundation. Other product, company and organization names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Names are used only to identify the products, services, standards and organizations discussed; their use does not imply endorsement or sponsorship by any of them, or any affiliation beyond the employment disclosed above, and citing a research firm, publisher, standards body or regulator does not mean it reviewed or endorses this deck.

Sources and quotations. Statistics, findings and short quotations from other publications remain their owners’ work; they are cited for commentary and research, and each source is listed in the handbook’s endnotes. Sponsored articles are marked as sponsored where they are cited. Links were checked when this edition was prepared and may change.

Illustrative material. The reference use cases are illustrative: their organizations and people are fictional, and their business cases, baselines, costs and phased values are not results from any customer or company. Measure your own baseline before relying on any illustrative figure.

Product information. Capability descriptions are based on public vendor documentation checked in September and October 2026. Products, names and features change, so check current vendor documentation before relying on any capability. Policies labeled custom are designs that an organization would build, test and support itself with the MuleSoft Policy Development Kit; they are not MuleSoft products.

Not professional advice. This deck is general information for architecture and technology planning. It is not legal, regulatory, compliance, financial or investment advice, or a security assessment of any organization; seek qualified advice before acting on those matters. It is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, and to the extent the law allows, John Fisher is not liable for any loss arising from its use.

Credits. Set in Plus Jakarta Sans, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Icons from Font Awesome Free by Fonticons, Inc., recolored, licensed under CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

These notices apply to the slides and the speaker notes.

About John Fisher

I’m John Fisher. At Salesforce, I help enterprises architect the data foundation that AI depends on: MuleSoft for integration and APIs, Informatica for data management, and the MCP and A2A protocols that connect agents to tools, data and each other. Before Salesforce, I spent fourteen years at TIBCO leading solution engineering for enterprise accounts. Across both companies, my work has sat where enterprise architecture, integration and data meet business strategy.

I’m also a statistician. I hold a master’s in computer science and mathematics from Drexel University and a master’s in applied statistics and data science from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. At the West Chester Statistical Institute, I lead the statistical analysis for research teams publishing peer-reviewed studies. And I’m building Aethos, an open-source, AI-first programming language for data cleaning, machine learning and AI.

My writing is where I work through what happens when AI agents move past experiments and start acting across real enterprise systems. The questions that interest me most are architectural: how an agent proves who it is, what policy decides what it may reach, how its cost is measured and controlled, what evidence it leaves behind, how agents built on different platforms work together, and what it takes to run all of that at scale.

Some of what I write names Salesforce, MuleSoft or Informatica technology. It’s the technology I know most deeply, so it’s often the quickest way to make an idea concrete. I use it as one example of a broader pattern, not as the only answer, and the target architectures I start from are vendor-neutral by design.

The views here are my own, drawn from public information, and they don’t represent Salesforce. Some of these ideas are settled; others are still taking shape, and I expect to revise them as the technology and the standards change. If you see things differently, or have seen something work in practice, I’d like to hear from you on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnrfisher.