New agentic AI tools bring new threat: agent sprawl

A familiar story

Sprawl, whether agentic AI or something else, is a familiar feature of new product categories in the enterprise technology space. We’ve already witnessed it during the rise of databases, the cloud, generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) — and also with an earlier generation of automation tools.

Likening agent sprawl to the unchecked spread of robotic process automation (RPA) during its heyday, Dion Hinchcliffe, lead of the CIO practice at The Futurum Group, said that RPA too began with small wins, such as automating invoices, onboarding customers etc., but quickly spiraled into a tangle of fragile, overlapping bots with poor governance.

“The same risk applies here: Autonomous agents are like RPA with a brain. They’re smarter and far more adaptable, but without coordination, they’ll collide, duplicate work, and confuse users and systems alike,” Hinchcliffe said.