I’ve been reading about autonomous AI teams that can work together on complex processes—like an AI CEO, an analyst, a researcher all coordinating on a single task. The pitch is that this reduces headcount and ongoing maintenance costs compared to managing individual workflows.
But I’m trying to understand the financial model. If I’m running three or four AI agents simultaneously to handle different parts of a process, are they all consuming tokens at the same rate? Does coordination between agents introduce hidden costs? I’m wondering if the cost per execution might actually scale up when you add more agents, which would undermine the cost savings argument.
Also, how do you actually price out the value of having agents work autonomously versus having people do it? Is the comparison straightforward—like, how much did this task cost in human time versus AI execution cost? Or is there complexity in the coordination layer that eats into savings?
Has anyone actually deployed a multi-agent system and measured whether the cost savings matched what you expected?