When Microsoft consolidated Semantic Kernel and AutoGen into a unified Agent Framework in October, the technical details dominated coverage. From our operational position at TinyFish, running millions of web agent sessions daily, we noticed a different signal: something about where value concentrates in this market.

Managing authentication across thousands of sites simultaneously teaches you which problems are coordination challenges and which are execution challenges. They commoditize at completely different rates.

What Platform Consolidation Reveals

When a major platform vendor merges two distinct orchestration approaches into common abstractions, the differentiation window is closing. Microsoft's move signals that orchestration patterns (the coordination logic routing tasks between agents) are standardizing faster than the market realizes.

What's becoming table stakes across frameworks: Model Context Protocol support, agent-to-agent communication standards, OpenAPI-based integration. The frameworks that seemed distinctly different six months ago now converge around similar capabilities. Recent analysis shows consolidation around dominant players, with organizations prioritizing stability over experimentation.

This convergence pattern repeats across infrastructure markets. Once coordination patterns prove themselves, they standardize quickly. Orchestration still matters, but it's becoming infrastructure rather than advantage.

What Actually Breaks in Production

The orchestration logic rarely fails. Deciding which agent handles which task is coordination, and it's getting solved.

What breaks is three layers deeper. A site's authentication flow changes overnight. Regional variations mean the same workflow needs different handling across markets. These aren't coordination problems that better routing logic can solve. They're execution problems requiring infrastructure depth.

We see this gap daily in operations. The capital flows confirm it. In November alone, over $3.5 billion moved into AI startups, with infrastructure companies capturing disproportionate share. Parallel raised $100 million specifically for web infrastructure for AI agents. Not orchestration frameworks. The execution layer that makes web agents reliable at scale.

That capital flows toward solving unglamorous problems that make web agents work in production.

The September launches of observability platforms from Cisco/Splunk and Monte Carlo drew less attention than orchestration announcements, but they address what actually fails: continuous monitoring, real-time visibility into agent behavior, tracing every step, detecting drift and regressions. The investment pattern reveals where defensibility lives.

Where Value Concentrates Next

Over the next six months, the orchestration layer continues commoditizing while defensibility concentrates elsewhere. More frameworks will converge around similar patterns. More platforms will offer comparable coordination capabilities. Vendors currently leading with orchestration as their primary differentiator need new ground.

Value is building in unglamorous layers that make agents reliable at scale. Observability systems providing genuine visibility. Security frameworks enterprises will actually trust. The execution infrastructure handling the messy reality of thousands of concurrent sessions.

For enterprises evaluating platforms, this pattern points toward looking past orchestration claims to what makes agents work in production. The vendors solving execution problems are building more defensible positions.

The orchestration race is ending. The infrastructure race is just beginning.