Agent sprawl silently kills productivity, frustrates users, and drives up costs. Walmart’s recent push to consolidate its AI agents into four “super agents” validates what we have been warning about: uncontrolled agent sprawl creates more problems than it solves.¹
Here is how to turn that chaos into coordinated success with Krista.
Why Too Many Agents Derails Productivity
Agent sprawl is not theoretical. It is a real, pressing issue. In an episode of The Union podcast, “Chasing Agents,” we explain how point solutions or agents multiply complexity, cause confusion, and derail adoption.
When tasks are spread across separate bots, teams waste time toggling between payroll tools, merchandising insights, and inventory alerts. Each standalone agent spawns its own data store and API connections, multiplying integrations and ballooning technical debt. Faced with this complexity, teams often fall back to using spreadsheets and manual handoffs, while ROI stalls as underutilized bots collect dust. The burden extends beyond daily frustration: evaluating more than thirty point solutions for a single workflow consumes weeks of procurement effort, delays project timelines, and strains budgets, making agent sprawl a strategic liability.
Walmart’s Wake-Up Call
Walmart built dozens of AI agents across its organization, only to find the proliferation confusing for users. As Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s CTO, explained:
“If I have an agent that helps you with your payroll and I have a different agent that helps with identifying merchandising trends, you shouldn’t have to remember that and switch between those two.”¹
That realization led Walmart to fold all those point solutions into four “super agents” for customers (Sparky), employees, engineers, and sellers and suppliers. Each super agent taps multiple behind-the-scenes bots, delivering a cohesive, single-interface experience.
Doug McMillon, Walmart’s CEO, put it this way:
“Artificial intelligence is already changing how we work. Learning and applying what we learn, as we build new tools, is the responsibility and an opportunity for all of us to improve experiences for our customers, members and fellow associates.”¹
Walmart’s move proves that simplifying AI access is essential for driving adoption and realizing value.
The Cost of Fragmented Agent Deployments
Fragmented agent deployments create hidden costs that erode the efficiency gains automation promises. When tools remain siloed, users abandon bots they cannot locate, and IT scrambles to maintain multiple integrations. Manual context switching reintroduces the delays agents were supposed to eliminate, turning your automation strategy into a burden rather than a benefit.
This strategic drag impacts your bottom line. To see how these challenges break down:
- Abandoned tools: users avoid half the agents because they cannot remember where to find them
- Mounting maintenance: multiple interfaces mean multiple upgrade paths, support contracts, and security reviews
- Inefficient workflows: manual context switching erodes time savings
- Barrier to scale: each new use case risks adding another isolated agent and creating new silos
The Krista Advantage
Krista’s agentic platform brings all your AI agent capabilities together under a single orchestration layer. It reads documents, extracts data, calls APIs, routes exceptions, and confirms outcomes through one intuitive interface to automate complete workflows rather than isolated tasks.
With Bring-Your-Own-Model (BYOM) support, you plug your own machine learning models (or Krista will build them for you) into Krista’s processes. Krista leverages your algorithms for decision logic and routing, ensuring every result aligns with your unique business rules. Behind the scenes, Krista dynamically invokes the right sub-agents or micro-services, so your teams interact with one “super agent” instead of juggling multiple interfaces.
Because every action flows through Krista’s orchestration layer, you get unified data handling, role-based access controls, complete audit logging, and built-in data privacy enforcement. This eliminates sprawl-induced security gaps and compliance risks while simplifying maintenance to a single upgrade cycle.
Move from Sprawl to Control Today
Agent sprawl is happening now, and it is costing businesses time, money, and user trust. Krista converts that chaos into coordinated success just like Walmart is doing.
Take action: Schedule a demo, map your current agent footprint, and see how Krista can consolidate your AI ecosystem into a single, powerful super agent. Do not let sprawl drive your strategy. Own it with Krista.
Sources:
Why Walmart Is Overhauling Its Approach to AI Agents, The Wall Street Journal
