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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.