The Missing Layer: A Workflow Commitment Protocol for Agentic Organisations

As organisations adopt agentic AI, much of their routine work is becoming a network of workflow engines run by agents and owned by accountable humans. These workflows must connect to each other, inside the organisation and across its boundaries. Two layers of connection are now standard: context (agents reaching tools and data, for example via the Model Context Protocol, MCP) and coordination (agents delegating to agents, for example via Agent2Agent, A2A). This paper argues that a third layer is missing: commitment. When one workflow hands work to another, the parties exchange obligations, not just data. We propose the term Workflow Commitment Protocol (WCP) for a standard way for workflows to make, track and settle commitments, sketch a reference architecture with functional entities and reference points, and propose governing connected workflows as a management system in the manner of ISO/IEC 27001. We predict that most serious failures in connected agentic systems will occur at the boundaries between workflows rather than inside agents.