Barco extends its API foundation to power agentic transformation.

Challenge

Move fast, scale smart, with AI agents

Barco NV is a Belgian tech company, specializing in professional-grade visualization, collaboration, and networking solutions. The €1 billion business focuses on three markets: healthcare, enterprise, and entertainment. Barco product innovation makes for better health outcomes, better live events, and better decision-making.

While Barco’s company heritage is rooted in technology hardware, its future will be increasingly software-led. The business wants to deliver impactful innovation to its customers, through hardware, software, and services. This will be driven by smarter and connected products, supported by new business models. “As a high-tech company, we foster innovation,” says Philippe Verlinde, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Barco. “It is critical we’re able to do so at speed. We want to be faster in our product development, faster to market, and more efficient as a team.”

Objectives

Bridging organizational silos to unify disparate data

To drive innovation and create new, digital products, the company is rebuilding its IT foundation with MuleSoft. The aim is to enable advanced agentic AI capabilities that will streamline operations and create new levels of business agility.

“Our ability to move fast and scale smart is rooted in a strong architectural strategy,” says Joris Diependaele, Senior Integration Architect at Barco. “The next phase of our growth will see us move from apps and systems to AI agents.”

The first step is to bridge the operational silos created by having three business units, distinct product lines, and international operations. This fragmented architecture meant countless amounts of product expertise, human experience, and workplace know-how was dispersed across the business.

The three business units will continue to operate independently, but Barco is standardizing access to certain shared services and data. Creating a foundational, common architecture across the three distinct business units, still allowing for specific integration needs. In doing so, the business will be better able to share knowledge, serve customers, and realize new sales opportunities.

Solution

Strengthening governance with centralized visibility and control

Barco is leveraging its existing IT investments to build a new, connected foundational layer on MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. This robust and resilient new architecture will power the next generation of services surrounding Barco products, and is already enabling Barco’s agentic enterprise.

With this API-first approach, MuleSoft is critical for providing centralized governance, visibility, and control. The composable building blocks (APIs) are offered as tools to the agents via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MuleSoft provides discovery and governance of all APIs in one platform, including an agent registry.

It enables business owners to deliver faster using pre-approved assets delivered by the central IT team. This limits the need for shadow IT development, and establishes governance from day one.

“Governance is layered in from the start and ingrained in our processes,” says Diependaele. “We have robust API governance in place, and now we’re extending that to our agents.”

Orchestrating agents to maximize performance

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform goes beyond traditional data integration, enabling Barco to build an AI orchestration layer. Many workflows are switching to become agentic, with MuleSoft orchestrating the end-to-end process.

The use of MuleSoft Agent Fabric allows Barco to direct a diverse range of AI agents, working across Sales, Service, Finance, and other shared services. This ensures agentic work is coordinated, collaborative, and secure.

It has led to the creation of Barco Genius, an AI-powered knowledge and product assistant. Barco Genius answers product-specific inquiries from customers and provides solutions using the company’s extensive knowledge base and product documentation. This approach accelerates self-service for customers, partners, and employees.

“Barco Genius is made up of a collection of headless agents, interacting through A2A,” says Diependaele. “It’s the backbone of our digital workforce.” These headless agents are able to then communicate with Barco’s digital workforce, including Agentforce, Copilot, and Joule.

Pull quote:

“As AI agents become critical in processes that drive our day-to-day business operations, governance and transparency are non-negotiable. MuleSoft Agent Fabric provides the guardrails we need to adopt AI responsibly and securely, without slowing down innovation.”

Joris Diependaele, Senior Integration Architect, Barco

Results

Minimizing risk while reducing development time

The result is a foundational architecture that is scalable and composable. Where point-to-point integrations were slow and manual, Barco has created an environment primed for continuous innovation.

“By embedding agentic AI into our architecture we’re enabling the business to move at speed,” says Diependaele.

Now, 5 cross-agent ecosystems are connected, orchestrated, and governed across the Barco IT estate. With the MuleSoft platform allowing certain components to be reused, the development time needed on new integrations has been reduced, says Diependaele.

The next phase, he adds, is to have headless agents managing the full agent lifecycle through MuleSoft Agent Fabric: “This really opens up the door for us to continue innovating across our enterprise, while still assuring 100% compliance and managing risk.”

Pull quote:

“MuleSoft Anypoint Platform allows us to deliver agentic projects faster and with ease. We’re now reusing composable building blocks as the cornerstone of our new architecture.”

Joris Diependaele, Senior Integration Architect, Barco