Your AI Agents Need a Registry, Not a Spreadsheet

Most enterprises can't answer a simple question: How many AI agents are running in your organization right now? Not chatbots. Not automations. Actual autonomous agents — making decisions, calling APIs, processing data across departments. If the honest answer is "we're not sure," you're not alone. And you have a governance problem that's about to get expensive.

The Agent Sprawl Problem

The scale of adoption is accelerating faster than most IT teams can track. The Cloud Security Alliance projects that 40% of enterprise applications will embed autonomous AI agents by the end of 2026. That means your finance team, your support team, your marketing team, and your engineering team are all building or buying agents — often without telling each other.

The identity problem alone is staggering. Traditional IAM systems were built for humans and service accounts, not autonomous agents that negotiate with other agents. Microsoft recognized this gap and launched Entra Agent ID specifically because the old identity models don't work for agents. If the biggest identity platform on the planet had to create a new product category, that tells you something about the scope of the challenge.

Then there's the regulatory dimension. The EU AI Act enforcement begins August 2026, with penalties up to €35 million or 7% of global annual revenue — whichever is higher. The Act requires organizations to maintain inventories of AI systems and demonstrate oversight. When regulators come asking, "show us your AI agent inventory," a shared Google Sheet with 15 rows and last-updated-in-January metadata won't cut it.

The bottom line: enterprises need a centralized, machine-readable, always-current catalog of every AI agent in their organization. They need a registry.

What Is a Private Agent Registry?

A private agent registry is a centralized catalog of your organization's internal AI agents — their capabilities, owners, environments, trust status, and protocol compliance. It's the single source of truth for every agent running in your infrastructure.

This is fundamentally different from the "shared spreadsheet" approach most teams default to. A spreadsheet is static, unstructured, and stale the moment someone deploys a new agent without updating it. A registry is API-driven, automatically updated, and enforces metadata schemas.

Architecturally, a private registry sits between the agent governance layer and the operational layer. TrueFoundry describes the concept as a central registry with RBAC, metadata management, and discovery APIs — a control plane for your agent fleet. It's the same pattern that worked for microservice registries (Consul, Eureka), container registries (Docker Hub, ECR), and API gateways (Kong, Apigee). Agents need the same infrastructure.

The A2A protocol's discovery specification explicitly supports this model. It defines "curated discovery" — company-specific or team-specific agent registries maintained by administrators, where agents are registered and discovered through a central service rather than ad-hoc URL scanning.

How Agentry's Enterprise Registries Work

We built Agentry's enterprise registries to be the fastest path from zero to a governed agent catalog. Here's how it works:

Sign up in 30 seconds

Create an organization, get an API key, and start registering agents immediately. No procurement cycle, no sales call required.

Register agents with rich metadata

Every agent gets a structured record: name, URL, description, category, environment (production, staging, or dev), team ownership, and freeform tags. This isn't just a name and a link — it's a full identity.

A2A discovery scanning

For every registered agent, we automatically scan the agent's domain for a /.well-known/agent-card.json Agent Card. The older path /.well-known/agent.json is also supported for backward compatibility. Agentry checks both. Based on what we find, each agent is assigned a trust tier — Verified, Basic, or Unverified — with a numeric trust score. This happens automatically on registration and on a recurring schedule.

API-first

Everything is a REST API call with X-API-Key authentication. Register agents from your CI/CD pipeline. Query the registry from your internal orchestrator. Build dashboards on top of it. No UI required (though we have one too).

Here's a typical workflow:

# 1. Create your registry
curl -X POST https://api.agentry.com/api/orgs \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Acme Corp", "email": "platform@acme.com"}'

# Response: { "id": "org-abc123", "api_key": "ak_...", ... }

# 2. Register an internal agent
curl -X POST https://api.agentry.com/api/orgs/org-abc123/agents \
  -H "X-API-Key: ak_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Invoice Processor",
    "url": "https://invoices.internal.acme.com",
    "category": "Finance",
    "environment": "production",
    "owner_team": "finance-eng",
    "tags": ["invoicing", "ap-automation"]
  }'

# 3. Scan for A2A compliance
curl -X POST https://api.agentry.com/api/orgs/org-abc123/agents/pa-xyz789/discover \
  -H "X-API-Key: ak_your_key"

# Response: { "card_found": true, "trust_tier": "verified", "trust_score": 82.5 }

Three API calls. You now have a registry with a registered agent, its A2A compliance status, and a trust score. Every change is timestamped. Every scan result is logged. That's the foundation of an auditable agent inventory.

Why A2A Protocol Compliance Matters Internally

You might think A2A Agent Cards are only for public-facing agents that need to be discovered by third parties. They're not. Even purely internal agents benefit enormously from A2A compliance.

Self-documenting agents

An Agent Card is a machine-readable manifest of your agent's capabilities, authentication schemes, supported modes, and skills. When your platform team needs to understand what the marketing team's content agent can do, they don't need to read documentation or ask on Slack — they query the registry and get a structured response.

Programmatic discovery

Internal orchestrators — the systems that route tasks to the right agent — can query the registry API to find agents by capability, category, or environment. Instead of hardcoding agent URLs, your orchestrator discovers them dynamically. This is the same pattern that made DNS and service meshes transformative for web infrastructure.

Trust scoring

Not all agents deserve the same level of trust. A well-documented production agent with proper auth, versioning, and A2A compliance should be treated differently than an experimental prototype running on someone's laptop. Trust tiers make this distinction automatic and enforceable. Route high-stakes tasks only to Verified agents. Restrict Unverified agents to staging environments.

Audit trail

When regulators or internal auditors ask "what AI agents operate in your organization," you need a complete, timestamped record — not a best-effort list assembled from memory. A registry provides exactly that: when each agent was registered, who owns it, what it does, what its compliance status is, and how that status has changed over time.

The A2A protocol specification explicitly envisions this use case. It describes "company-specific or team-specific Agent registries maintained by administrators" as a first-class discovery mechanism — not just public, open-web discovery, but private, governed, internal catalogs.

Pricing — Start Free

Agentry's enterprise registries are designed to scale with you:

• Free tier — Up to 5 agents. Full API access, A2A scanning, trust scoring. Useful even for small teams managing a handful of agents.
• Growth — Up to 50 agents. Priority scanning, team management.
• Enterprise — Unlimited agents, SSO, dedicated support, custom SLAs, and advanced analytics.

The free tier is genuinely useful — not a bait-and-switch. If your team has three or four agents in production, that's enough to establish a governed catalog and demonstrate value to leadership before committing budget. See the full pricing breakdown on the enterprise page.

Get Started

Your agents already exist. They're already making decisions, calling APIs, and processing data across your organization. The question is whether you have visibility into what they are and what they're doing.

A private agent registry gives you that visibility — and with Agentry, it takes 30 seconds to set one up. Create your free registry, register your first agent, and start building the governance foundation your organization will need when the auditors come knocking.