Everyone is racing to build one agent that can do everything. Justin Schroeder, co-founder of Standard Agents, thinks the future looks more like thousands of tiny ones. Ahead of his talk on domain-specific agents at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, he explains why tightly scoped agents might be the smarter bet, even if it feels like a step back toward the single-purpose machine learning models of a few years ago.

What happens to an MMORPG when half the players never log off? Issac Lee, who runs AI and blockchain experiments at NEXUS, has been testing that idea. His team is filling game worlds with agent players instead of scripted NPCs, so a new title feels alive from day one.

Picture a startup with ten engineers hammering away on AI and one person lying awake over a $20,000 bill that hasn't arrived yet. That's the scenario we put to Jason Ward, who handles FinOps for AI at C.H. Robinson and recently joined the FinOps Foundation's AI working group. Jason's first answer is not glamorous: tag every AI resource so you know who owns it. The rest of the episode is what that makes possible. He walks through how C.H. Robinson runs AI across order entry, quoting, booking, and tracking, and why the team routes Anthropic models through Vertex AI to keep data locked down. Then come the metrics. Jason uses AI to dig through his own observability platform for signals he didn't know were there. One of them is how chatty a model is. That signal turned a prompt bloat alert into a bug in the code that kept retrying and burning tokens. Its opposite, context starvation, burns tokens too: a model with too little context keeps failing and trying again. We also cover why agentic and conversational workloads need separate baselines. Jason explains why cost per order is the easy win, and why most of the real work doesn't fit into neat discrete tasks. That's where his experimental cost per thought metric comes in, with reasoning ratio and cache hit rate alongside it. His advice is simple: your AI is the best tool you have for understanding your AI.