Episode 10: The Missing Layer in Enterprise AI with Vertesia’s Chris McLaughlin

No single AI platform is going to become the “one ring to rule them all”. The enterprise AI stack is fragmented by nature, but an orchestration layer lets governed, durable agents work across the systems you already have.

On the Mostly Unstructured Podcast, KeyMark CMO Clay Tuten sits down with Chris McLaughlin, Chief Revenue Officer of Vertesia, to unpack why enterprises end up running six, seven, eight AI tools at once — and how an orchestration layer, agents that can actually reach your data, and content that’s genuinely readable by an LLM turn that sprawl into work that gets done with humans in charge of decision making.

Topics explored:

• Why no single AI platform has “won,” and how enterprise AI fragmentation mirrors the ECM point-solution era
• What an orchestration layer actually is: agents and subagents working across systems, data sources, and other agents
• Data in motion vs. data at rest, and why stripping text out of documents destroys the tables and structure LLMs need – How preparing content correctly lets an LLM read it accurately instead of hallucinating
• Governance and auditability: knowing what agents can access, what they decide, and why
• How the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation compressed months of grant scoring into a few hours, with volunteers still making the decision
• Working with AI vs. AI doing the work for you — and why you don’t need clean data or your biggest project to start

Questions this episode answers:

• What is an AI orchestration layer and why do enterprises need one?
• Why hasn’t a single AI platform replaced all the others?
• What is the difference between data in motion and data at rest?
• Why do LLMs hallucinate when reading documents, and how do you prevent it?
• What is MCP (Model Context Protocol) and why does it matter for enterprise AI?
• What’s the difference between working with AI and having AI do the work for you?
• How should a CIO or CDO get started with enterprise AI without perfect data?

If you’re a CTO, CDO, or CIO staring at a pile of AI tools that don’t talk to each other — or getting pressure from the board after a pilot that didn’t pan out — this is a practical look at where enterprise AI value actually comes from.

Subscribe for more talks on enterprise AI, orchestration, and content intelligence from the team at KeyMark. And if anything here sounded brilliant, just assume we planned it… and that it was probably Chris.