Agent Architecture Cost-Success Trade-offs: A Controlled Evaluation across Enterprise-Style SOPs

arXiv:2611.12953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprises increasingly use large language model agents to execute standard operating procedures (SOPs): long, branching, tool-intensive workflows. Yet there is little controlled evidence for choosing among competing agentic architectures. Holding the model, tasks, and tools fixed and varying only the architecture, we compare four designs (a function-calling single agent, a skill-augmented agent, centralized multi-agent orchestration, and a triage swarm; eight arms) across 13 enterprise SOPs, and introduce a skill-definition quality rubric to build matched high and low-quality skill corpora. Three takeaways emerge.