Tame autonomous agents before they blow up your costs and controls

Your enterprise is hurtling into an agents-everywhere free-for-all. OpenAI’s recently launched Agent Mode (now part of ChatGPT-5) puts every boardroom on notice and agentic opportunities in the hands of every employee. Early DIY experiments with agents left CIOs wrestling with runaway token bills, shadow agents, and audit concerns. WRITER claims to fix all three issues with its new Action Agent. Yet this promise of productivity breakthrough comes with caveats.

The agent gold rush is real, but ‘them thar’ hills may be steeper than they look

Every hyperscaler and LLM lab is pitching agents as autonomous AI that writes code, ships apps, and addresses regulatory requirements, easing many boardrooms’ productivity concerns. Toolchains are converging fast, but most offerings are priced by the token and light on enterprise guardrails. It’s no surprise that pilots stall when finance and risk teams get sight of the bill.

Our report ‘How to avoid agentic sticker shock’ reveals the risks of underestimating the true costs beyond the initial token pricing, including compute, memory, orchestration, APIs, security, and staffing. The report calls for transparency in pricing models to manage complex AI systems effectively (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: CIOs and CTOs must understand the cost of the full AI agent system

Source: HFS Research, 2025

WRITER offers cost control and benchmark-beating performance

WRITER’s freshly-minted Action Agent spins up a disposable Linux VM for every session and works through a plan it generates by itself. The sandbox keeps corporate data isolated while providing a full toolchain for web search, code execution, and file creation. Crucially, WRITER dumps per-token pricing. Enterprises pay an annual fee tied to seats and number of agents, unlocking unlimited LLM usage.

The company backs its bravado with solid benchmark bragging rights, currently hitting the top of the CUB leaderboard for computer-use agents. The leaderboard is a scorecard that measures how well autonomous AI agents actually use a computer and a web browser to complete multi-step, end-to-end tasks.

Early adopters such as Franklin Templeton and Uber already run regulated or mission-critical workloads on WRITER agents.

Benchmarks aren’t business outcomes—ecosystem alignment matters

Yet benchmarks are not business outcomes. Unlimited usage can just as easily mask idle-cycle waste, and a one-vendor sandbox may lock you out of broader orchestration frameworks emerging from the hyperscalers. Yes, WRITER has more than 100 pre-built agents and partnerships with Accenture, Cognizant, AWS, Google Cloud, and Deloitte. And yes, WRITER is part of the founding cohort of AI vendors contributing to Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A protocol) for interoperability, but is their ecosystem your ecosystem? Verify that your preferred platforms and DevSecOps pipelines are on the roadmap, especially if you intend to pursue multi-agent choreography across clouds.

Where to look before you leap

While subscription pricing may soothe CFOs’ nerves, CIOs must still ensure they apply agent-level KPIs tied to revenue, margin, or risk reduction to create value. Cost certainty does not equal value outcomes. And before kick-off, it’s crucial to ensure access to the right data, in the state required, to deliver the desired outcomes.

There’s no doubt WRITER’s CUB ranking proves engineering chops, but that’s not the same as production resilience. For that, you should demand road tests in your own environment before signing on the dotted.

Finally, WRITER’s supervision dashboard and audit trail are welcome, but human-in-the-loop design is left optional. Insist on policy enforcement that mirrors your existing approach to governance, risk, and security.

Beyond ‘brand-tone copilot’ to the owner of your agent lifecycle

WRITER has leapt from ‘brand-tone copilot’ to ’AI HQ’ in barely a year, riding a thesis that lean, long-context models plus predictable economics will unlock mass agent adoption. Action Agent is the next chapter: a bid to own the agent lifecycle before the hyperscalers bake similar controls into their own platforms. WRITER’s momentum is real, but you must be ready to evaluate Action Agent against what is bound to come from Microsoft, Google, and others: Agent Mode-style capabilities released into enterprise SKUs. Given OpenAI’s example, we doubt you’d wait long.

The Bottom Line: Pilot with purpose, not with blind faith.

CIOs should give Action Agent a sprint but make it earn its keep. Start with one pain point where full autonomy beats today’s RPA+LLM kludge. Instrument the pilot ruthlessly: elapsed time, human hours saved, policy violations prevented, dollar impact delivered. If the metrics sing, scale in waves and bake WRITER’s subscription into your FinOps playbook. If not, be ready to pivot fast, because the agent arms race won’t wait.