Agent Teams: When One Agent Isn't Enough
Some processes span payroll, benefits, and HR at once. Coordinated agent teams handle that, but coordination is a design discipline, not a default.
A single agent handles a single job well. But real HR processes often span several domains at once, a life event touching payroll, benefits, and core HR together. That's where agent teams come in, multiple agents coordinating, and coordination is a genuine design discipline, not something that just happens because you built more than one.
Give each agent a clear remit
In a team, each agent should own a well-defined piece, one handles the payroll implication, one the benefits, one the record update. Blurred remits mean agents stepping on each other. Clear boundaries make the team predictable.
Define how they hand off
The value of a team is the coordination, one agent's output feeding the next. Design those handoffs explicitly, because an undefined handoff is where things fall between agents, the same way work falls between departments.
Keep a human overseeing the whole
A team of agents doing a multi-step process needs someone accountable for the end-to-end outcome, not just each piece. Design the human oversight of the whole flow, not only the individual agents.
Real scenario: a client wanted to automate a complex onboarding that spanned three domains. We resisted one giant do-everything agent and built a small coordinated team, each with a clear remit and defined handoffs, with a human owning the overall result. It worked because the coordination was designed, not assumed. More agents without coordination is just more chaos, design the team.