From Monoliths to Agentic AI — The Shift Every Founder Should Understand

“How much of your current work or upcoming curriculum deals with Agentic AI?”

That was the question a friend asked me recently. My answer?

Everything.

We’re standing at the edge of a major shift in how software is built, run, and reasoned with. And if you’re a founder—even if you don’t write code—you should understand the architecture that’s coming, because it’s going to reshape how businesses operate.

Let’s walk through it:

🧱 Stage 1: Monolithic Architecture

This is where most of us started. All your logic, all your data, all your UI—everything lives in one codebase. It’s like a tightly packed snowball. Easy to throw, hard to untangle.

• Great for: Fast prototypes, small teams

• Painful for: Scaling, maintaining, or updating pieces independently

🧩 Stage 2: Microservices

To solve the scale problem, we broke the snowball into cubes. Each microservice does one thing well: billing, auth, inventory, etc. Each has its own data source and API.

• Great for: Scalability, fault tolerance, flexibility

• Still requires: Human logic, orchestration, and coordination

🤖 Stage 3: Agentic AI Architecture

Now we break away from static rules and handoffs. In this architecture, autonomous agents take ownership of goals. They can plan, act, and adapt—powered by AI and guided by vectorized memory and APIs/tools.

Each agent:

• Has its own input/output

• Talks to its own memory (usually a vector database)

• Connects to an AI model for reasoning and execution

• Can call other agents or tools as needed

Think: not just “run task,” but “figure out the best way to achieve the goal.”

The progression of code

Why It Matters for Founders

• You don’t need to know how to code an agent.

• But you do need to know what agents can do—and how to leverage them.

• It’s like hiring your first team: you’re still the visionary, but you’re no longer manually doing every step.

Agentic AI turns business logic into something more alive.

Less instruction. More direction.

We’re moving from If this, then that

To Here’s the goal, figure it out.

Curious how this looks in real-world systems?

Check out my simple diagram of agentic architecture

Want to dive deeper? join me in the FoundersCommunity.io, it's free—I’ll be writing more on this shift and getting the input from other founders.