.svg)
.svg)
Adopting agentic automation is rapidly becoming a priority in enterprise IT.
AI agents that can make contextual decisions and execute end-to-end workflows autonomously promise faster response times, reduced manual effort, and more scalable operations for IT and operational teams who are under pressure to do more with less.
Consequently, organizations are experimenting with a growing number of agentic automation tools available on the market. Each of these comes with a compelling use case and a strong ROI story. At this early stage in what will promise to be the agentic era, the investment is justified.
However, many teams have found that productivity gains have failed to materialize at the expected scale.
The core issue is that, while an expanding portfolio of agentic automation tools does increase automation output, it also drives up operational overhead, security exposure, and coordination effort. Each additional tool introduces hidden costs that, over time, slowly erode overall automation ROI.
The Hidden Cost of Each New Automation Tool
Agentic automation tools are typically adopted incrementally. A team identifies a bottleneck, selects a tool that appears well suited to address it, integrates it into a specific part of the system, and then moves on.
When evaluating ROI, team leaders may consider the cost of licensing fees, deployment time, and initial enablement, but what’s often overlooked is the cumulative operational cost that emerges over time.
When integrated in a fragmented, ad hoc manner, each automation tool brings with it its own execution engine, configuration model, permissions, logging format, and failure conditions. While manageable in isolation, these differences compound as more tools are introduced across a working system. Over time, teams are no longer just managing the outcomes of automation; they are also forced to manage the complex arrangement of the automation ecosystem itself.
This hidden cost may escape from budget forecasts at the outset, but it shows up eventually as slower delivery, increased cognitive load on engineers, and growing friction between different parts of an operational system.
This is what leads to question the viability of agentic automation and its long-term return on investment.
How Tool Sprawl Erodes Automation ROI in Practice
Let’s take a closer look at the real impact of tool sprawl in day-to-day operations, when multiple agentic automation tools are adopted in a fragmented way, without centralized planning or a unifying strategy.
Operational drag increases
Each platform requires its own expertise, monitoring approach, and troubleshooting workflow. When automation fails, engineers must first identify which tool executed the action, then locate the relevant logs, understand its operational context, and assess downstream impact. Time that should be spent finding new automation opportunities is instead spent investigating and remediating existing flaws.
Security and access risk intensifies
AI agents require personalized credentials and access permissions, just as human operators do. That means every additional tool introduces another access model to design, review, and maintain. Permissions are often defined differently depending on the tool and who configured them, making least-privilege enforcement inconsistent. Over time, reviewing which tools have access to which critical systems becomes a manual, error-prone exercise, increasing both security risk and administrative overhead.
Governance and accountability become fragmented
As automation is distributed across multiple tools, there is no longer a single source of truth for governance and compliance. Ownership of workflows becomes unclear, approval mechanisms vary by platform, and documentation is scattered. Audits, incident investigations, and risk assessments require teams to reconstruct events across disconnected systems rather than reviewing standardized, centrally generated records.
Collectively, these issues erode the returns agentic automation is meant to deliver. Instead of accelerating teams, automation becomes harder to deploy with confidence and more expensive to operate.
The fundamental problem isn’t that agentic automation is inherently risky, but that fragmented automation environments are poorly suited to absorb the increased speed, scale, and autonomy that agentic systems introduce while mitigating their risks.
When fully operational, agentic systems don’t just execute occasionally, at the request of a human operator. Instead, they make decisions and take action continuously with little human input. This is the source of their productivity potential, but it also dramatically amplifies the inherent cost of weak execution, governance, and oversight models.
The solution must be a unified execution and orchestration layer that establishes top-down governance, standardization, and visibility across all automation. Only with this foundation in place can organizations ensure that agentic automation delivers sustained value to the system as a whole rather than hidden cost.
Consolidation as a Strategic Advantage
Avoiding the hidden costs of agentic automation requires rethinking the automation environment and operational context that it operates in.
Consolidating automation into a single unified governance, execution, and orchestration model doesn’t mean restricting teams to a narrow set of approved tools or locking the organization into a rigid, innovation-stifling architecture. Instead, it means standardizing important aspects of how automation runs, while making system-wide configuration, visibility, and performance tracking intuitive.
A centralized execution and orchestration layer provides:
- A consistent, controllable, and traceable execution path for all automation, regardless of tooling choices.
- Unified access control configuration and consistent enforcement of security policies.
- An intuitive interface for creating, optimizing, and sharing automation workflows.
- Standardized logging, monitoring, and observability across all automated actions.
- Clear ownership and accountability, even as automation scales across teams and environments.
With this foundation in place, teams can adopt agentic automation tools where they deliver the most value, without introducing new configuration complexity or security risk each time. Autonomy increases, but risk and operational overhead do not.
This alone enables agentic automation to deliver sustainable ROI. Each improvement compounds rather than cancelling out in increased operational overhead, while governance and security remain enforceable regardless of how automation is authored, integrated, and scaled.
Consolidation transforms agentic automation from a collection of local integrations into a system-level capability.
From Tool Sprawl to Automation at Scale with ScriptRunner
ScriptRunner was designed to eliminate the hidden costs created by fragmented automation execution and tool sprawl.
It provides a centralized execution and orchestration platform for Microsoft automation, allowing organizations to consolidate how automation runs without restricting how it is designed.
In practice, this means:
- All automation, whether human-triggered or agent-driven, executes through a single governed engine.
- Permissions are clearly auditable across scripts, workflows, and agents, and can be configured intuitively based on permitted actions.
- Pre-approved automation workflows can be shared safely across teams through a governed self-service portal.
- Logs and audit trails are generated consistently for every automated action.
- Agentic automation workflows can run continuously without introducing new security, governance, or operational risks.
By consolidating execution with ScriptRunner, organizations can operationalize agentic automation without sacrificing control, flexibility, or ROI.
Instead of struggling to manage an expanding collection of disconnected tools, teams gain a stable foundation for applying automation to real business problems at scale. Automation becomes easier to operate, safer to expand, and more valuable over time.
To see how ScriptRunner helps eliminate the hidden costs of tool sprawl and unlock sustainable agentic automation ROI, book a meeting today.