Multi-Agent Systems: Patterns That Work Beyond the Demo
In our previous posts, we broke down the individual components of production AI agents: how the tool-calling loop works, how system prompts govern behavior, how MCP connects agents to business systems, and how to configure extension points in practice. Each of those posts examined a single agent doing a single job.
This post is about what happens when one agent isn’t enough.
2025 was the year of single AI agents. 2026 is the year they start working together. The AI agent market is growing at 46% year over year, and Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of this year — up from less than 5% in 2025. But Gartner also predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027, and the primary killers are cost overruns, coordination complexity, and inadequate governance.