Agents Are Where Microservices Were in 2015 — Roberto Milev & Uday Kanagala, Navan
Navan architects argue AI agents are at the same inflection point as microservices in 2015
“If you can't build a single agentic loop, why go in and try to build a multi-agent orchestrated system?”
Navan's chief architect Roberto Milev draws a direct parallel between today's agentic AI systems and the microservices era of 2015, arguing that a standardized reference architecture is now emerging around runtime, memory, context management, and orchestration. The key insight is that agents are stateful by nature — requiring persistent sessions and isolation — which breaks assumptions baked into traditional stateless API infrastructure. Navan runs heavily on AWS Agent Core Runtime in production, supplementing it with custom session persistence and rehydration layers.