We’ve been experimenting with setting up multiple AI agents—basically having different specialized agents handle different parts of a business process. The idea is that you get better results because each agent is optimized for its specific role rather than trying to do everything with one generic AI model.
But I’m trying to understand what this actually costs at scale.
With a single AI model in a workflow, you’re paying one subscription cost plus whatever operation costs apply. When you’re orchestrating multiple agents, does the cost scale linearly? Does each agent require its own subscription?
I’m asking because we’re trying to compare enterprise pricing for Make and Zapier, and if one platform makes orchestrating multiple AI agents cheap and the other doesn’t, that could be a significant decision factor. The enterprise comparison gets way more complicated if you have to account for multiple concurrent agents versus a single agent doing everything sequentially.
I’ve seen ROI calculations that claim coordinating multiple AI agents reduced processing time by 70% or so, but I haven’t seen clear numbers on what that actually costs. Is it cheaper per unit because the work gets done faster, or is the upfront cost of running multiple agents offsetting those savings?
Has anyone actually deployed a multi-agent automation and tracked what the actual monthly costs ended up being compared to similar single-agent workflows?