--- title: "Oops: Bosses Realize Their Companies Have Been Swarmed by Legions of Redundant AI Agents" description: "Executives are now grappling with the overflow of expensive and redundant AI agents that they ushered in in the first place." date: "2026-05-17" modified: "2026-05-17" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/bosses-realize-companies-swarmed-ai-agents" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Oops: Bosses Realize Their Companies Have Been Swarmed by Legions of Redundant AI Agents ![A person with gray hair is sitting behind a laptop, with only the top of their head visible above the screen.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images* Woe is the c-suite. After heedlessly embracing AI tech at the expense of their workers, some bosses [are now whining to *The Wall Street Journal*]() that their companies are being overrun by [out-of-control AI agents](). One company grappling with the influx is Magnum Ice Cream, the parent company of Ben & Jerry's. We're just as stupefied by the idea of an ice cream maker deploying AI bots en masse as you are, and we're 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. Per the *WSJ*, his chief gripe was that AI agents are both too easy to use and create, as tools like Anthropic's Claude Cowork allow anyone to build custom agents to automate all kinds of tasks. "Because everybody can do it, we're probably going to end up with a lot of people having the same types of agents," 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. "Depending on how all of this will turn out, there'll be tokens, and then there's going to be cost, and then you end up with, 'How do we manage this to make sure that it's under a financially responsible model?'" he added. This entirely self-inflicted issue is being called "AI agent sprawl," and has received increased attention this year as agentic models, and [AI coding tools in particular](), have been rapidly adopted across tech and financial sectors (and ice cream companies, apparently). As an example, the consulting firm Gartner recently [published guidance]() on how to manage AI agent sprawl, revealing that only 13 percent of companies think they have robust enough "AI agent governance" in place. It also predicted that the average Fortune 500 company will have over 150,000 agents in use by 2028 — a meteoric surge from the less than 15 that those companies use today. Who knows if that'll actually happen, but you can't deny executives' enthusiasm for the tech. The chief customer officer of FICO Mike Trkay bragged to the *WSJ* that its 3,500 employees are creating dozens of new AI agents every day "at every tier of the hierarchical structure." 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. "Because we care for our patients, we have to scale with safety," Narasimhan assured. **More on AI:** [*AI Appears to Be Trapping Certain Job Applicants in a Limbo Where They Never Get an Interview for "Reasons" That Are Completely Unfair*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()