The AI Agent Counting Contest
17 October 2026
On October 8, Orange Spain and Google Cloud announced that Orange Spain had deployed over 1,000 custom AI agents, built by employees across HR, IT, sales and customer service.
On surface one thinks: 1,000 agents! Quite a number.
And Orange isn’t alone. Increasingly, we are seeing companies talk about how many AI agents they have deployed, how many Copilot licenses they have rolled out, or how many employees are using AI.
Nothing wrong with tracking these numbers. But I do wonder how much they tell us about the actual value being created.
How many agents are running is one thing. What they are actually achieving is another.
Thought this deserved a little humour.
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