When agent delegation earns its cost

This worked application uses explicit planning assumptions to demonstrate FIELD. Quantities below are inputs, calculated implications or proposed targets; they are not reported customer results. The engagement decision remains conditional on the evidence described.

Planning basis and engagement boundary

F — Frame the outcome

Decide whether five agents improve accepted research outcomes enough to justify extra cost, latency and coordination.

Value measure: Cost and elapsed/human time per accepted report at a common quality bar.

I — Investigate the workflow

Compare failure modes of a single agent and deterministic workflow. Identify genuinely independent work and whether elaborate prose masks unchanged accuracy.

First evidence task: Blind-review single-agent and multi-agent reports on the same unseen tasks.

E — Engineer the solution

Keep bounded delegation, shared budgets and explicit result contracts only for roles that add measurable value; preserve the single-agent baseline.

The implementation assessment below makes the authority, workload, resource and failure assumptions concrete. Its numbers are calculations from the stated scenario, not a vendor performance guarantee.

Baseline

Implement a fixed retrieve→calculate→write workflow and a bounded single-agent version before evaluating five specialists. Freeze tasks, source access, model versions, output requirements and budgets. Define verified report correctness, coverage, latency and cost; elaborateness is not an outcome metric.

Delegation option

A coordinator creates independent evidence-gathering tasks with scoped contexts. Specialists return structured claims with citations/calculation references. A deterministic merge/deduplication layer assembles evidence; one writer owns the final artifact and an independent verifier checks claims. Shared mutable edits are versioned rather than overwritten concurrently.

Resource model

Suppose each specialist receives the same 5,000-token context: five copies already create 25,000 input tokens, before coordination/review. Parallelism can reduce wall time only for independent work and within model/tool quotas. The critical path includes the slowest required specialist, merge, writer and verification; summing all worker times describes total work, not elapsed latency.

Failure scenarios

Conflicting edits become proposals against a base version, with one commit owner. A reviewer endorsing a false claim does not count as verification; use source/state/calculation checks. Repeated impossible delegation consumes a parent-owned replan budget and ends in partial/escalated status.

Ablation

Compare single agent, fixed parallel retrieval and full delegation under equal budgets, then under each design's efficient configuration separately. Remove one specialist at a time. Report paired uncertainty by task/source family, not just a few impressive examples. Correlated mistakes from the same model/source are a reason to strengthen verification, not add more votes.

Decision

Choose multi-agent only for demonstrated gains in independent investigation, specialization or context separation that justify overhead. Keep the fixed workflow when the task path is stable and it performs as well.

L — Launch with evidence

Use identical tasks, evidence and scoring, including reviewer time and token/tool cost. Promote multi-agent complexity only when the trade-off is favorable.

Critical decision condition: No architecture promotion based only on report length or stylistic impressiveness.

Attach raw artifacts, the tested configuration, population, denominator, date and limitations to the release record. Missing or stale evidence holds the dependent decision. A favorable value forecast cannot offset a failed critical condition.

D — Develop ownership and reuse

A workflow owner owns the architecture decision and revisits it after model changes; retain a simpler operating mode.

Candidate reusable asset: Controlled architecture comparison harness.

Commercial decision and next commitment

Accountable decision owner: Research product/technical owner.

The initial commitment is the bounded journey above, with the stated exclusions. Confirm access, customer staffing and acceptance ownership during discovery; price and schedule unresolved dependencies explicitly. A new source, tenant class, language, action or operating envelope requires an impact review rather than silent scope growth.

Approve only the next exposure level supported by the evidence. The next useful investment is: blind-review single-agent and multi-agent reports on the same unseen tasks.

Method and references

Apply the FIELD method, economic model and evidence rules. Methodological and technical influences are listed in the source register.