# Towards a science of scaling agent systems: When and why agent systems work

DevFeed: [Towards a science of scaling agent systems: When and why agent systems work](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/towards-a-science-of-scaling-agent-systems-when-and-why-agent-systems-work-6908.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://research.google/blog/towards-a-science-of-scaling-agent-systems-when-and-why-agent-systems-work/>)

Published: 2026-01-28T11:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The latest research from Google](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-latest-research-from-google.md>)

Topics: [AI Agent](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-agent.md>), [observability ai agents](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/observability-ai-agents.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Generative AI](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/generative-ai.md>), [Google](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/google.md>), [AI Chat](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-chat.md>)

Tags: [agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agent.md>), [agentic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agentic.md>), [agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agents.md>), [ai-agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agents.md>), [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [benchmarks](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/benchmarks.md>), [evaluation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/evaluation.md>), [generative-ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/generative-ai.md>), [google](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/google.md>), [machine-intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/machine-intelligence.md>), [research](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/research.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>)

## AI overview

Google Research reports a controlled evaluation of 180 agent configurations examining how multi-agent systems scale. Multi-agent coordination improves performance on parallelizable tasks but can reduce performance on sequential tasks, and a predictive model identifies the optimal architecture for 87% of unseen tasks.

## Source excerpt

Generative AI