{"id":79697,"date":"2026-06-19T17:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/79697\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T17:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:30:11","slug":"a-few-good-agents-why-less-may-be-more-in-the-ai-world-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/79697\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Good Agents: Why Less May Be More In The AI World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Business<\/p>\n

The fewer agents the better?<\/p>\n

getty<\/p>\n

How many capabilities can be crammed into an AI agent? A great consolidation may be on the horizon, as it may be far more effective and less costly to add new skillsets into existing agents rather than attempting to deploy fleets of narrow-task agents to accomplish workflows. Even the most technology-savvy leaders are still pondering and probing where the ceiling is in terms of containing agent sprawl and complexity. <\/p>\n

This was one of the challenges explored by a panel of industry movers and shakers at the recent Snowflake Summit in San Francisco, which focused on finding the ROI of moving AI and agentic AI from prototyping to production. \u201cYou have to be careful in \u2018skills\u2019 versus \u2018agents\u2019 thinking,\u201d cautioned Sriram Sitaraman<\/a>, CIO at Synopsys. “Do you want to automate something, or do you want to actually create an agent, which is a different cost structure, usage pattern, and governance and all those things?” <\/p>\n

The opportunity \u2013 and challenge \u2013 is that AI agents can quickly slip beyond the bounds initially set for them, he continued. \u201cAutomation is binary. And you can give a human direction. But with agents, it\u2019s a little bit more complicated. Agentic is going to lead you down a path, so you have to be careful.”<\/p>\n

While the emphasis has been creating and unleashing an agent for every purpose, organizations are finding that adding skills is more productive. \u201cSkills have turned out to be a more agile and smaller unit of currency,” said Maddie Want<\/a>, vice president of data at Fanatics. Examples of more granular skills that can be extracted from existing agents include \u201ccodifying a particular piece of knowledge and sharing that across the org. The conversation we have now is does this need to be an agent, or is this just a skill? A lot of the time it\u2019s just a skill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sitaraman\u2019s team started seeing about a year ago that \u201cAI was able to do the work, really good at doing the job of a junior employee \u2013 being able to run quick queries and create graphs and create charts and kind of derive insights.\u201d At the time, they started deploying various agents, such as a revenue agent for the finance department that runs reports and a debug agent for the ticketing system to support their data centers.<\/p>\n

What the Synopsys team is now moving toward is the idea of a \u201cknowledge agent\u201d that could be deployed \u201cin multiple dimensions \u2013 quality, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness.” Previously, organizations had to choose two of these dimensions and drop the third, he related. \u201dBy focusing on data, we could move all three metrics more positively,” he related.\u2019<\/p>\n

AI gets better \u2013 not diluted \u2013 as it scales. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how much data volume you throw at it, because AI is truly a linear scale,\u201d Sitaraman said. “The more data it has, the better decisions it makes.\u201d<\/p>\n

This scaling up in AI agent quality was evident at Fanatics, where Want oversees data engineering, data science, and machine learning for the company\u2019s betting and gaming division. \u201cOver time, the degree of investment we had to make in the context layer is decreasing,” she related. “And the degree of supervision an agent needs before its able to start autonomously answering questions is decreasing. And our ability to measure the accuracy of the answers is increasing. We can have more confidence in answers without looking.”<\/p>\n

At the same time, agents were broadening their scope. \u201cLines are blurring between agents limited in scope, purely analysis agents, and agents that users want to go further and do more with,” said Want. “Like blending into operational use cases. because you\u2019ve got the information right there. You can act on that immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agents\u2019 roles can be expanded in unexpected directions. \u201cNever underestimate what an agent can do,\u201d Sitaraman continued. “You may have a sales-ops agent, but there\u2019s nothing stopping it from being a sales analyst agent, and a sales-something-else agent.\u201d This is not a process that should develop willy-nilly: frameworks are essential to the intent and context of expanding the scope of agentic-based work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fewer agents the better? getty How many capabilities can be crammed into an AI agent? A great…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,7537,3999,7899,43038,43394],"class_list":["post-79697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-fanatics","tag-snowflake","tag-snowflake-summit","tag-sriram-sitaraman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}