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New Amazon paper finds that for enterprise workflows, a single agent is usually the best default, because multi-agent setups cost far more for small gains.
Teams automating long, branching business procedures can pick a single agent, an agent with skills, an orchestrator with workers, or a swarm of specialists. Little controlled evidence exists for choosing among them.
They ran 4 agent designs, as 8 variants, on Claude Opus 4.8 across 13 enterprise procedures. Tasks and mock tools stayed fixed, so only the architecture changed.
Every multi-agent or skill setup used 1.4x to 4.7x the tokens of the single agent, mostly for small gains. A first multi-agent build lost to the single agent, 58.2% to 67.4% task success, while a repaired version won but cost the most tokens.
Start with a single agent, measure success per workflow, and fix implementation bugs before paying for a more complex architecture.