Every team that connects agents to real tools hits the same wall at roughly the same time. It usually looks like a Slack message: "Who has the Jira token?"
Here's what's underneath that, and what a gateway does about it.
The N×M problem
You have N agents and M tools. Connect them directly, and you get N×M integrations. Each one carries its own credentials, its own auth flow, its own error handling, its own version drift.
Three agents and four tools is twelve connections. Ten agents and twenty tools is two hundred. Nobody plans for that number — you arrive at it one integration at a time.
