Control Plane
Definition
A control plane is the layer that manages a system without being part of the workload itself: it holds the registry, the policies, the monitoring and the controls, while the work runs elsewhere. In AI, a control plane oversees every agent in the estate without replacing any of them.
The term comes from networking and cloud infrastructure, where separating the control plane from the data plane is what makes large systems governable. Applied to AI it draws the same line: agents do the work, the control plane decides what is registered, what is measured, what needs approval and what gets stopped.
The property that makes an AI control plane useful is neutrality. A control plane that only controls one vendor's agents is that vendor's admin panel. The point is one set of axes and one set of controls across everything the business runs.
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