I was reading about Softbank’s plans to use artificial intelligence agents instead of human employees. Their CEO mentioned that they would need around 1000 AI agents to replace just one person at work.
This seems like a lot to me. Why would you need so many digital workers to do what one human can do? The CEO said it’s because people have “complex thinking patterns” but I’m not sure I understand this logic.
From what I read, these AI agents would work all day and night without breaks. They would cost about 23 cents each per month to run. So 1000 agents would cost around 230 euros monthly compared to paying one human salary.
Has anyone else heard about this approach? Does it make sense from a technical standpoint? I’m curious about how these AI systems would actually coordinate with each other to replace human work. Would love to hear thoughts from people who understand this technology better than me.
The thousand agent thing shows SoftBank doesn’t get what makes humans valuable at work. I’ve rolled out AI in manufacturing - it’s not just about task complexity, it’s adaptability when things go sideways. When equipment breaks unexpectedly, human operators don’t just follow the manual. They hear when something sounds off, feel weird vibrations, spot visual changes that aren’t documented anywhere. They MacGyver solutions with whatever’s lying around. That intuitive problem-solving comes from tons of implicit knowledge you can’t write down. SoftBank thinks human thinking is just a bunch of separate functions you can swap out one by one. But our brains don’t work that way. We blend emotional intelligence, pattern recognition, and context awareness without even thinking about it. The real problem isn’t managing a thousand agents - you’d need way more agents just to handle how all those specialized functions talk to each other. Every new agent creates integration points that need more oversight agents. It’s a complexity nightmare. This feels like fancy justification for cutting jobs, not a real technical solution. The maintenance costs alone would probably cost more than just paying human salaries.
Honestly, this sounds like complete BS from SoftBank’s CEO. If you need 1000 agents just to replace one person, doesn’t that prove AI is way less efficient than humans? The coordination nightmare between all those agents would probably break down constantly. Seems like they’re just trying to justify massive layoffs with fancy tech buzzwords.
I’ve been doing enterprise automation for years, and the 1000 agent thing actually makes sense when you think about how our brains work. We’re not just doing one task - we’re constantly running background processes, filtering noise, keeping context, adjusting on the fly based on tiny cues.
When we rolled out RPA at my last company, what seemed like basic data entry turned out to have 47 different decision points and edge cases. The human doing it handled all of that subconsciously. We needed a separate rule or micro-agent for each one.
The real problem isn’t getting agents to work together - it’s the knowledge management underneath. Humans are incredible at pulling random experience from totally unrelated stuff and applying it instantly. AI systems need explicit connections between all these specialized agents to fake that kind of associative thinking.
SoftBank’s cost math probably doesn’t include the infrastructure to make 1000 agents actually useful together. You need monitoring, error handling, version control, constant retraining. Still cheaper than human salaries theoretically, but the operational complexity is insane.
The 1000 agents thing sounds like typical CEO marketing speak to me. I’ve built distributed systems for years and this setup would be a nightmare to manage.
Here’s the thing - humans are basically general purpose processors. We switch between writing emails, solving problems, talking to customers, and making decisions all in the same conversation. Current AI agents are more like specialized microservices that handle one tiny task really well.
You’d need separate agents for reading documents, extracting data, formatting responses, checking compliance, scheduling meetings, and on and on. Then you need orchestration layers so they don’t step on each other.
I worked on a project last year where we tried something similar with automated code reviews. Dozens of small AI services each checking different things. The coordination overhead was insane.
The real issue isn’t the number of agents though. Human work involves tons of context switching and judgment calls that are hard to break into discrete tasks. A customer service rep might need to be empathetic, technical, and business savvy all in one phone call.
The cost math might work on paper, but managing 1000 AI processes per employee? That’s gonna need a lot of human oversight anyway.