We modelled a seven-department business run by 133 scoped agents under a human oversight layer. Payroll for the equivalent org chart runs to hundreds of thousands a year; this one runs on roughly $500 a month in API tokens. The interesting part isn't that it works — it's where it breaks, and what the humans are actually for.
Human oversight
approve · escalate · own the judgment calls
Sales
24 agents
Marketing
21 agents
Support
28 agents
Finance
14 agents
Ops
22 agents
HR
9 agents
Engineering
15 agents
The architecture: one oversight layer, seven departments, one shared audit log.
The org chart, inverted
A traditional company assigns people to functions and hopes the handoffs hold. An agent company starts from the handoffs. Every department is defined by what it receives, what it produces, and who it escalates to — and each agent inside it is scoped to one narrow, testable job: read the carrier email, draft the reply, reconcile the ledger line. No agent has a job description a human would recognize; together they cover one.
The 133 number sounds dramatic, but it's really just decomposition. Sales runs 24 agents because prospecting decomposes into research, verification, brief-writing, sequencing, and follow-up — and each is more reliable as a separate agent with a separate test suite than as one clever generalist.
What each department actually runs
Support carries the biggest headcount (28) because volume lives there: triage, drafting, order lookups, escalation summaries. Finance is smaller (14) but the most tightly scoped — matching, flagging, and reporting, with every action logged and reversible. Marketing's 21 agents feed one content pipeline with compliance checks before anything ships. Ops, HR, and Engineering follow the same pattern: many small agents, one shared memory, one audit log.
Where it breaks
Three places, reliably. First, ambiguity at the boundaries — when a ticket is half support and half finance, agents ping-pong until a routing rule settles it. Second, novel situations: anything without precedent in the shared memory gets escalated, and if escalation is slow the whole lane stalls. Third, silent drift — an upstream system changes its format and four agents downstream quietly degrade. Monitoring catches it, but only because every action is logged against an expectation.
The load-bearing wall is human
The oversight layer isn't ceremony. Humans own the judgment calls: pricing exceptions, unhappy customers, anything with legal weight, anything novel. The system's job is to make those calls rare, well-briefed, and reversible. That's the real economics — not replacing seven departments, but concentrating the humans where judgment actually pays.
Under the hood
system design: sources in, one agent mesh, one audit trail out
The workflow, end to end
Four of the seven departments shown — one oversight layer, one shared audit log.
The takeaway
Agents don't replace the org chart. They compress everything that was never really a judgment call — and make the remaining human work visible, briefed, and worth the salary.