Agentic Nesting: A New Methodology for Existing Enterprise Application Integration and Services

Enterprise operations extensively rely on multiple heterogeneous business systems and information applications, which also result in severe data silos and process fragmentation. Enterprises have invested considerable financial and material resources in building these applications, however, effectively leveraging and orchestrating them remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches to enterprise application integration, encompassing middleware architectures such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), API gateway infrastructures, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), suffer from inherent limitations like high architectural coupling, escalating operation and maintenance costs, and limited intelligence capabilities. This paper proposes Agentic Nesting, a multi-agent collaboration framework in which existing enterprise applications are encapsulated as autonomous AI agents within a hierarchically nested structure. Rather than flat interconnection, agents are organized into layered stewardship topologies that mirror the compositional complexity of enterprise ecosystems. The framework extracts a digital agent proxy from each legacy application to enable natural-language interaction and autonomous manipulation, coordinates multiple agents through a central orchestrator for task decomposition and dynamic dispatching, and exposes a unified conversational interface for cross-application querying and process orchestration. The main contributions of this paper are the proposition of the "Application-as-Agent" integration paradigm and the "Conversation-as-Integration" interaction philosophy, together with an exploration of the generalization potential of this methodology in scenarios encompassing heterogeneous system coordination, and large-scale data applications.