Engineering the Agentic Enterprise Semantic MVCC: Transactional State Management for Agentic Systems

Abstract

Agentic systems require coordination mechanisms that traditional database concurrency control cannot provide. While Data MVCC resolves conflicts through data representation—normalizing facts to canonical addresses where conflicts are structural—agentic systems face a fundamentally different challenge: multiple reasoning components reading the shared state and emitting intents that may not both be permissible given system constraints. We introduce Semantic MVCC, a framework for transactional state management in agentic systems. The core insight is that agentic memory should serve as a reasoning surface where state, recall, inference, and update are unified operations. We define Semantic ACID guarantees, present a practical implementation based on append-only intent logging with deterministic state derivation, and demonstrate the framework through case studies in insurance underwriting and trading desks. The architecture requires no novel primitives—it composes event sourcing, snapshot isolation, and domain-specific resolution functions into an auditable, replayable system suitable for regulated industries.