Agentic workflows are artificial intelligence-powered software systems that chain together multiple models and external tools to tackle complicated tasks, like analyzing a video and answering questions about it. But the way these highly fragmented systems are designed and deployed often causes inefficiencies that can lead to wasted computation, energy and cost.

To improve efficiency, researchers from MIT and Microsoft developed an intelligent system that streamlines the process of designing agentic workflows and automatically optimizes how those workflows are implemented. With this new method, a developer can describe what they want the agentic workflow to do in plain language, without needing to specify all the details of their application in advance.

The system automatically figures out the best models and tools to use, as well as the ideal hardware configuration and computational resource allocation when the workflow is executed by a cloud provider. It adjusts those configurations on the fly based on each user’s priorities, such as minimizing costs or maximizing speed.