Integration Tiers
Definition
Integration tiers describe how deeply an AI agent can be connected to a management platform, based on what the agent exposes: from inline gateway routing with full visibility, to native telemetry, to vendor admin APIs, down to plain registration for closed black boxes. The point of the tiers is that nothing is left ungoverned and nothing has to be rebuilt.
Agents you build or self-host can route inline through a gateway: full transcripts, per-request cost, budgets enforced before spend happens. Cloud runtimes stream their own telemetry with near-full fidelity. Closed platforms are polled through the vendor's admin and audit APIs. And true black boxes, the embedded copilots that export nothing, are still registered, owned, bounded and logged.
Being explicit about each tier's ceiling is the honest part of the model: a black box does not become transparent by being registered, but it stops being invisible. Any vendor claiming every agent must be rebuilt onto their framework is selling an agent builder with a governance tab.
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