We’re planning to set up autonomous AI teams—a CEO agent, an analyst agent, maybe a researcher agent—all working on the same complex process. On paper, it sounds efficient. Each agent has a specific role, they collaborate, the workflow completes faster.
But I’m concerned about coordination costs. Every time agents need to hand off work to each other, that’s overhead. Every decision point where one agent waits for another introduces latency. And if they disagree or produce conflicting outputs, we need logic to resolve that.
The more agents you add, the more complex the coordination becomes. I’m wondering at what point the added capability gets eaten by the coordination overhead.
Has anyone actually measured this? Like, what’s the real cost difference between a simple two-agent workflow and a five-agent workflow doing the same work? Are we talking milliseconds, or does coordination start to bite hard after a certain threshold?
And practically speaking, when have you found that adding more agents actually made things worse instead of better?