As “AI agents” become a default buzzword, many teams jump straight to complex architectures without a clear reason.In this talk, I introduce a practical framework to decide when to use workflows, single agents, or multi-agent systems when building LLM-powered applications.

We’ll break down what each approach actually is, how tool use and context management change the picture, and what trade-offs matter in practice: cost, latency, reliability, and complexity.

The goal is not to promote agents, but to help engineers and teams make better architectural decisions based on real constraints and experience from production AI systems at Towards AI.