{"id":489325,"date":"2026-05-17T14:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T14:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/489325\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T14:45:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T14:45:15","slug":"oops-bosses-realize-their-companies-have-been-swarmed-by-legions-of-redundant-ai-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/489325\/","title":{"rendered":"Oops: Bosses Realize Their Companies Have Been Swarmed by Legions of Redundant AI Agents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Sign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n<p class=\"pw-incontent-excluded article-paragraph skip\">Woe is the c-suite. After heedlessly embracing AI tech at the expense of their workers, some bosses <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/cio-journal\/companies-have-a-new-ai-problem-too-many-agents-9539c4d6\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">are now whining to The Wall Street Journal<\/a> that their companies are being overrun by <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/claude-ai-deletes-company-database\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">out-of-control AI agents<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">One company grappling with the influx is Magnum Ice Cream, the parent company of Ben &amp; Jerry\u2019s. We\u2019re just as stupefied by the idea of an ice cream maker deploying AI bots en masse as you are, and we\u2019re even more baffled that its chief information officer of the Americas Michael Friedlander felt that he needed to set the record straight on the issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Per the WSJ, his chief gripe was that AI agents are both too easy to use and create, as tools like Anthropic\u2019s Claude Cowork allow anyone to build custom agents to automate all kinds of tasks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\u201cBecause everybody can do it, we\u2019re probably going to end up with a lot of people having the same types of agents,\u201d Friedlander told the WSJ. Magnum Ice Cream, he added, will eventually have to condense and centralize all of its AI agents, noting that they are cybersecurity risks and cost expensive tokens to use.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\u201cDepending on how all of this will turn out, there\u2019ll be tokens, and then there\u2019s going to be cost, and then you end up with, \u2018How do we manage this to make sure that it\u2019s under a financially responsible model?&#8217;\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">This entirely self-inflicted issue is being called \u201cAI agent sprawl,\u201d and has received increased attention this year as agentic models, and <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-code-tearing-through-corporations\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">AI coding tools in particular<\/a>, have been rapidly adopted across tech and financial sectors (and ice cream companies, apparently).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">As an example, the consulting firm Gartner recently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gartner.com\/en\/newsroom\/press-releases\/2026-04-28-gartner-identifies-six-steps-to-manage-artificial-intelligence-agent-sprawl\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">published guidance<\/a> on how to manage AI agent sprawl, revealing that only 13 percent of companies think they have robust enough \u201cAI agent governance\u201d in place. It also predicted that the average Fortune 500 company will have over 150,000 agents in use by 2028 \u2014 a meteoric surge from the less than 15 that those companies use today.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Who knows if that\u2019ll actually happen, but you can\u2019t deny executives\u2019 enthusiasm for the tech. The chief customer officer of FICO Mike Trkay\u00a0bragged to the WSJ that its 3,500 employees are creating dozens of new AI agents every day \u201cat every tier of the hierarchical structure.\u201d The kidney care giant DaVita is also swamped with AI agents, with CIO Madhu Narasimhan telling the newspaper that employees have created over 10,000 of them. \u201cBecause we care for our patients, we have to scale with safety,\u201d Narasimhan assured.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\"><strong>More on AI:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-job-applicant-limbo-cortex\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">AI Appears to Be Trapping Certain Job Applicants in a Limbo Where They Never Get an Interview for \u201cReasons\u201d That Are Completely Unfair<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up to see the future, today Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Woe&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[18,19,17,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-489325","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116590459480562456","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}