Grief is the C-suite. After recklessly adopting AI technology at the expense of their employees, some bosses now whining wall street journal That their companies are being overrun by out-of-control AI agents.
One company struggling with the influx is Magnum Ice Cream, parent company of Ben & Jerry’s. We’re as shocked as you are by the idea of an ice cream maker deploying AI bots en masse, and we’re even more astonished that its Americas Chief Information Officer Michael Friedlander felt he needed to set the record straight on this issue.
Per WSJTheir main complaint was that AI agents are too easy to both use and create, as tools like Anthropic’s Cloud Cowork allow anyone to create custom agents to automate all kinds of tasks.
“Because everyone can do it, we’re probably going to have a lot of people have the same type of agents,” Friedlander explained. WSJ. Magnum Ice Cream will eventually have to condense and centralize all of its AI agents, he said, given that they are a cybersecurity risk and expensive tokens to use.
“It depends on how it will all happen, there will be tokens, and then there will be costs, and then you finally say, ‘How do we manage this to make sure it’s under a fiscally responsible model?’” he added.
This entirely self-inflicted issue is being called “AI agent spillover,” and it has received more attention this year as agentic models, and especially AI coding tools, have been increasingly adopted in the tech and financial sectors (and ice cream companies, obviously).
For example, recently the consulting firm Gartner published guidance on how to manage AI agent proliferation, revealing that only 13 percent of companies think they have sufficiently strong “AI agent governance.” It’s also predicted that the average Fortune 500 company will have more than 150,000 agents by 2028 — a huge increase compared to the fewer than 15 those companies use today.
Who knows if that will actually happen, but you can’t deny executives’ enthusiasm for the technology. FICO Chief Customer Officer Mike Trucke bragged WSJ That its 3,500 employees are creating dozens of new AI agents every day “at every level of the hierarchical structure.” Kidney care giant DaVita is also full of AI agents, with CIO Madhu Narasimhan telling the newspaper that employees have created more than 10,000 of them. “Because we care about our patients, we have to operate safely,” Narasimhan assured.
More on AI: It appears that AI is trapping some job applicants in limbo, where they never get an interview for “reasons” that are completely unfair.
