Ask ten people what an enterprise architect does and you'll get ten answers. Ask an enterprise architect and you'll usually get a tired laugh. The role is broad, important, and chronically understaffed.
The ten jobs in one title
- Know the current state: what systems exist, what they do, how they connect.
- Assess the impact of change before it goes ahead.
- Plan the target state and the roadmap to get there.
- Keep standards and documentation true to what actually runs.
- Manage dependencies and integrations.
- Rationalise the portfolio: what to keep, consolidate or retire.
- Govern how AI is used across the estate.
- Retain knowledge when people and partners move on.
- Advise the business with fast, accurate answers.
- Support M&A, carve-outs and integrations.
Where the time actually goes
In practice, most of an architect's week disappears into the first job: finding out what's true today. Chasing the developer who wrote the interface. Reading a spec that may or may not match the code. Running a workshop to rebuild knowledge that existed once and wasn't written down.
That discovery work is necessary, but it isn't architecture. It's archaeology. And because it never finishes, the strategic work, the roadmap, the rationalisation and the AI governance, gets squeezed into whatever time is left.
What changes with an agent
We built Vera to take on the digging. She maps the current state, traces impact, reconciles documents with code and answers questions, all with sources attached. That frees the human architect for the parts of the job that need a human: deciding trade-offs, aligning stakeholders, owning risk and setting direction.
Vera does the digging. Your architects make the calls.
We've mapped all ten responsibilities to what Vera delivers for each on her job description page. If you're an architect, we'd love to hear which of the ten you never get to.