VMware Tanzu's Nick Kuhn: Treat AI agents like any app

Nick Kuhn, a tech marketing lead at Broadcom's VMware Tanzu who previously spent fourteen years inside a large enterprise, says the core challenge is that enterprises are highly regulated, often with no internet access or even true air gaps where hardware is carried physically into data centers. He notes that vendors often assume internet access, which fails in these environments. Prior to agents, platforms like Cloud Foundry and Tanzu helped developers push code that the platform would turn into a secure container with ingress, certificates, and health monitoring handled automatically. Kuhn says the same principle now applies to agents: customers want the same repeatable pattern so they can audit and secure deployments without recertifying everything. The main technical gap he highlights is that agents were originally built with file system access and markdown files as memory, which breaks in ephemeral cloud environments where state must be saved elsewhere. He also says customers want agents and LLMs co-located with apps and data to avoid latency from many network hops, and that some SaaS providers are not reliable enough for traditional enterprises. The outcome hinges on whether state management and reliability can be solved in a way that matches the expectations enterprises have for software.