AEAF — Agentic Enterprise Architecture Framework

An enterprise-architecture framework for the human–agent enterprise. AEAF reworks the discipline of enterprise architecture for a world in which AI agents are first-class actors — executing work, consuming the architecture at runtime, and being governed as participants rather than tools.

The standing critique of classical EA frameworks is that they are too heavy to sustain — catalogs maintained by hand go stale, and a stale architecture stops being trusted. AEAF answers that on two fronts: its content is shaped for agentic systems (autonomy, guardrails, evals, accountability), and its tooling makes the artifacts cheap to produce and keep current, because agents do the upkeep that used to defeat adoption.

TOGAF® is a registered trademark of The Open Group. AEAF is independent and original work; it is neither derived from, a profile of, nor endorsed by The Open Group. Where AEAF draws a parallel to TOGAF, it is a migration aid for existing practices, not a claim of lineage.

What's here

📚 books/ — the framework, as published PDFs

• AEAF — The Framework (Book 1): what the agentic enterprise is and how to architect it — the meta-model, the five domains (BDAT + Intelligence & Agency), the method (Preliminary + 10 phases), the nine new artifacts, the dual governance loop.
• AEAF in Practice (Book 2): how to adopt and run it — tailoring, playbooks, the artifact templates, checklists and gates.
• AEAF At a Glance: the one-page summary.

🛠️ tools/ — the framework, made executable

• tools/templates/ — every AEAF artifact as a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter: the 9 new artifacts, the 10 changed classical artifacts, supporting views (Regulatory Obligations Register, Determinism-Fit Map), deliverables (Vision, Architecture Definition Document, Roadmap…), phase worksheets, decisions, and gate checklists. Diff-able, human-editable, agent-writable, PDF-renderable.
• tools/skills/ — broadly-usable skills (skills standard) that make AEAF light enough to execute: aeaf-author, aeaf-allocate, aeaf-guardrails, aeaf-evals, aeaf-govern, aeaf-maturity, plus two end-to-end workflows — aeaf-retrofit (lift an existing service to AEAF level) and aeaf-greenfield.
• tools/validate/ — a deterministic, no-LLM linter (aeaf_validate.py) that checks an AEAF repository for integrity: every cross-reference resolves, accountability is never an agent, oversight matches autonomy, every runtime principle compiles to a guardrail. Run it in CI.
• tools/example/ — two fully-worked, machine-validated examples, each carried through the AEAF phases:
  • customer-support/ — a fictional parking operator's agentic support line (EU-compliant, every ID resolving): agentic done right, with governance. Its the-drift/ companion contrasts a just-do-it PoC with the AEAF-governed version — why controlled architecture is the difference between a collapsing demo and a business.
  • automation-portfolio/ — a fictional SaaS vendor placing six capabilities on the determinism spectrum: where AI belongs — rules where the answer is specifiable, an LLM only where the value is genuinely probabilistic (the right answer is sometimes less AI, placed deliberately). Its the-default-trap.md contrasts LLM-by-default with determinism-fit allocation.

Quick start

# Validate an AEAF artifact repository (no dependencies, Python 3 stdlib only)
python3 tools/validate/aeaf_validate.py tools/example/customer-support --report

The artifacts are plain Markdown + YAML frontmatter, so they render to PDF with any Markdown→PDF toolchain that supports Mermaid and Vega-Lite. Pre-rendered example PDFs are included under tools/example/.

Start reading at tools/templates/00-processing-model.md (why Markdown + frontmatter), then tools/templates/conventions.md, then a worked example's walkthrough — tools/example/customer-support/walkthrough.md (agentic done right) or tools/example/automation-portfolio/walkthrough.md (where AI belongs).

Licensing

This repository is dual-licensed:

Part	License
The books (books/)	CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — read and share with attribution; no commercial use, no derivatives. See LICENSE-books.
The tools (tools/)	Apache-2.0 — use, modify, and build on freely, including commercially. See LICENSE-tools.

See NOTICE for trademark and attribution details.

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AEAF is created and maintained by Latentti.