2026 began with the viral success of OpenClaw, setting a new trend in the AI boom, because a chatbot that answers your questions is good, but an AI agent that does complex tasks for you is much better. In this context, more and more workers are creating their own agents that make their work easier, often with companies encouraging them with their employment policies. tokenmaxxing. Now, some companies are realizing it’s a problem.
what’s happening. They tell it in the Wall Street Journal. The success of platforms such as OpenClaw or Claude Cowork has lowered the barrier to entry for any employee to create their own AI agents, even without having programming knowledge. This has caused some companies to be inundated with these agents, often with functions that overlap between them and without centralized control. This is the case of the healthcare company DaVita, where employees have already created more than 10,000 agents.
The problem. Having so many agents is a nightmare from an information management and security point of view. As each employee does it on the fly, there is no unified system, but one creates it on his laptop with Claude Cowork, another does it on the server… This means that the technical departments cannot have control of all the agents in the company.
There is another important problem: more agents, more token consumption and higher bills. As we said, many of these agents are doing the same tasks, one for each employee. It’s like paying for dozens of different taxis to take each person separately to the same place, instead of sharing a bus.
Agents for all. There are many workers creating AI agents to help them with day-to-day tasks, from simple things like summarizing emails or writing a report, to higher-level tasks like automating workflows. There are also more aggressive approaches like that of Meta, which was building an AI agent for its CEO and in the future proposes that each employee have their own, so that communication will be done through the agents.
Unify. It is the solution to avoid duplication of agents and security risks, but it is not an easy task for companies that already have this problem. In statements to the Wall Street Journal, Lyft says that they have managed to create a process so that employees can share Claude’s Skills among themselves, avoiding duplication of efforts, and they are also working on a centralized platform so that the IT department can control all the agents.
At DaVita, the company we mentioned above, they have banned the use of agentic AI tools among employees to prevent the proliferation of more agents.
More control. All of these issues are not dampening enthusiasm for agents, but rather pushing platforms to offer more centralized control and governance features. This is the case of Anthropic, which has launched functions to facilitate management by administrators, such as access roles, expense management and usage analysis.
Image | with Magnific
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