Tray.ai Named Gartner Visionary as AI Orchestration Redefines Integration

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 18, 2026 – By Melissa Adams

Tray.ai has once again been recognized as a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), marking the third consecutive year the company has held this distinction. The placement underscores a fundamental transformation underway in the enterprise software landscape, where traditional integration is no longer sufficient and a new category—AI orchestration—is emerging as a critical business imperative.

This year's report highlights a growing divide between legacy platforms built to simply move data between systems and next-generation platforms designed to orchestrate complex AI-driven processes. Tray.ai's consistent placement in the Visionary quadrant suggests its strategy is deeply aligned with this market evolution, focusing on the sophisticated needs of enterprise AI.

"Enterprise AI is at an inflection point, and traditional iPaaS isn’t built for what is happening now. The era of integration for integration's sake is over," said Rich Waldron, Co-founder and CEO of Tray.ai, in a statement. He emphasized that modern enterprises require an orchestration platform built specifically for AI, agents, and the data that fuels them. "To us, being named a Visionary is important, but what matters most is that the world's fastest-growing companies like Life360, Apollo, Yext, and Zuora trust us to be the backbone of their AI strategy."

Redefining Integration: The Rise of the AI Orchestration Platform

The iPaaS market is experiencing a seismic shift, with industry analysts noting that AI is now a mandatory component. The core function of these platforms is evolving beyond simple data transport to encompass intelligent orchestration. This new paradigm demands capabilities that traditional tools were not designed for: grounding AI agents in accurate, real-time data; governing interoperability to prevent security risks from unmanaged AI tools; and providing the deep observability needed to monitor and control autonomous agents at scale.

This trend reflects a broader convergence of technologies, including business process automation (BPA) and low-code application platforms (LCAP), into a more holistic approach to enterprise automation. The goal is no longer just to connect applications but to create intelligent, adaptive systems that can reason, act, and learn. As organizations deploy more AI agents, the need for a central control plane to manage them becomes paramount, preventing the rise of 'shadow AI' and ensuring that automated processes are secure, compliant, and auditable.

Gartner's Visionaries: A Glimpse into the Future of iPaaS

In Gartner's highly regarded Magic Quadrant, vendors are evaluated on two key axes: 'Ability to Execute' and 'Completeness of Vision.' While Leaders are recognized for their market dominance and proven execution, Visionaries are distinguished by their innovative roadmaps and deep understanding of where the market is headed. They are the trendsetters, often introducing disruptive technologies that address emerging end-user problems.

Tray.ai's third consecutive year in the Visionary quadrant signifies a sustained and successful focus on innovation. This placement validates its forward-looking strategy, which bets that the future of enterprise automation lies not in simple point-to-point integrations but in a comprehensive platform for building, managing, and scaling intelligent AI agents. This consistent recognition suggests that the company is not just participating in the market but actively shaping its future direction, pushing the boundaries of what an integration platform can achieve.

Building the Backbone for Enterprise AI

Tray.ai's recognition is supported by a year of significant product innovation aimed at addressing the practical challenges of enterprise AI adoption. The company has rolled out a suite of tools designed to form a cohesive platform for AI orchestration.

Key among these is the Merlin Agent Builder, a no-code environment for creating and deploying autonomous agents. Recent updates have focused on closing the gap between deployment and adoption by introducing Smart Data Sources to automatically prepare and vectorize enterprise knowledge, and providing agents with both short- and long-term memory to handle complex, multi-turn interactions. This is complemented by multi-LLM flexibility, allowing teams to use models from OpenAI, Gemini, Bedrock, and Azure.

To address governance, the company launched Agent Gateway. As enterprises rush to adopt AI, many face the risk of employees using unvetted AI tools, creating security and compliance vulnerabilities. Agent Gateway provides a managed environment for IT to build and publish secure AI tools based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), establishing a firm governance framework.

Other innovations include Data Engineering, which unifies data transformation and cleansing within the platform, and the launch of pre-built agents like the ITSM Agent and HR Agent. The ITSM Agent, for example, goes far beyond simple chatbots to automate complex ticket resolution and access provisioning across systems like ServiceNow and Jira, with some customers reporting over a 40% reduction in tickets routed to human agents.

Strategic Moves and the Path Forward

Further cementing its commitment to intelligent automation, Tray.ai acquired Vanti, a knowledge modeling technology firm, in early 2025. This strategic acquisition is aimed at deepening the intelligence at the core of the Merlin Agent Builder. Vanti's technology enables AI agents to better ingest, structure, and reason with complex domain knowledge, allowing them to adapt to changing business conditions and make more sophisticated decisions.

The integration of Vanti's capabilities promises a new class of AI agents that can operate with a deeper contextual understanding, continuously refining their performance. This move, combined with the company's organic product development and consistent recognition from Gartner, paints a clear picture of the future Tray.ai is building—one where integration platforms serve as the central nervous system for the intelligent, automated enterprise. This evolution signals that the true power of enterprise AI will be unlocked not by individual tools, but by the platforms that can safely and intelligently orchestrate them all.