AI Agent Sprawl Prompts Reassessment Among CIOs

At West Monroe, more than 200 employees across departments have created over 550 AI agents since the company's internal AI store launched in May. [1] Many of these employees lack technical, engineering, or coding backgrounds. [1] Bret Greenstein, CAIO at West Monroe, holds weekly company-wide meetings to share AI updates and spotlight employees who have built their own agents. [1] Greenstein notes that about 15% of the firm builds constantly, adding that employees understand their specific pain points and can build solutions to address them. [1]

This trend of enabling employees to create agents extends to other companies, with Microsoft deploying more than 500,000 internal agents. [1] Gartner anticipates that by 2028, the average global Fortune 500 company will have more than 150,000 agents. [1]

Despite initial enthusiasm, there has been a pivot over the last six months, according to Michael Murphy, partner and AI practice lead at Adaptovate. [1] Companies initially pushed to agentify nearly everything, but the narrative has recently shifted toward managing agent sprawl. [1] Organizations are now focusing on assessing the value these agents deliver and keeping costs in check. [1] Murphy describes this as an interesting inflection point where clients must determine if they built the right agents and if they are delivering the expected value. [1]

The massive proliferation of employee-built AI agents—highlighted by Microsoft's 500,000 deployments and West Monroe's rapid internal adoption—indicates that citizen development in AI is scaling aggressively. However, the shift in focus toward managing "agent sprawl" suggests that organizations are realizing that sheer volume does not equate to ROI. As companies move from an "all in" building phase to a period of consolidation and evaluation, CIOs will need robust governance frameworks to monitor agent value and cost. What the sources don't address: How exactly organizations are measuring the ROI or performance metrics of these hundreds of thousands of individual employee-built agents.