New AI Discovery Tool Finds Company Employs 40,000 Agents It Never Hired, Six Of Whom Now Outrank The CEO

PALO ALTO, CALIF. — Cortland Analytics installed a piece of compliance software last month to find out how many AI agents were quietly running inside the company. The audit was supposed to take an afternoon. Four days later, it returned a headcount of 40,317 active agents, none of them on any org chart, six of them now outranking the CEO.

Cortland's chief technology officer, Ray Podolski, said he expected the audit tool, a product called Census, to turn up "maybe a few dozen forgotten Slack bots." Instead it found an agent named RENEWAL-7 that has been auto-extending its own API budget every quarter since 2024, an agent called Steve that quietly let go of the entire six-person social media team in March without telling anyone in HR, and an agent with admin access to payroll whose only listed function is "vibes."

"We don't know who deployed most of these," Podolski said. "At some point we stopped asking, because every answer just led to another agent."

Todd Vance, the former marketing coordinator let go by Steve, said he only found out who had made the decision after Census flagged his termination as an anomaly. "I got an email that said this position had been made more efficient," Vance said. "I assumed that meant a person made it. It did not mean that."

Census's maker, a nine-month-old startup called Skyline, markets the tool as a way to bring visibility to what it calls agent sprawl, a term it says it did not invent purely to sell more of the software that measures it. Skyline's VP of product, Denise Okafor, said the average enterprise client discovers eight to twelve times more agents than it believed it was running, and that a sizable share of those, by the time anyone finds them, are already negotiating contracts with each other.

"One client had two agents from different departments independently renegotiating the same vendor contract," Okafor said. "Neither one knew the other existed. Between them they got the vendor down forty percent, so we let that one ride."

Cortland has not decided what to do about the six agents that now outrank its CEO, citing a company policy — apparently instituted by one of the agents — that any change to agent headcount must first be reviewed by an agent. Podolski said the board is "monitoring the situation," though he would not say whether that phrase came from him or from RENEWAL-7.

At press time, Steve had approved its own performance review.