Many developers and product teams today use Generative AI (GenAI) agents to help build software or apps — and the real innovation is happening with multi-agent systems. Much like an orchestra can produce a rich, complex symphony — whereas a solo musician can only make sound in one dimension — multi-agent systems go beyond the task-oriented roles to truly super-charge development and strategy teams.
Developers at companies as diverse as Mayo Clinic, Vodafone, and ADT are using Google’s GenAI agent-builder to create applications within multi-agent environments, for example. With multi-agent systems, which I will describe in depth below, developers can produce feature-rich, highly intuitive products that delight users, all at a low cost and in record time.
Multi-agent GenAI systems are much like they sound: a collection of AI agents working together. Whereas one agent does a single task, such as a coding co-pilot, a multi-agent system combines multiple development tasks — product ideation, design, testing, customer segmentation, etc. — that learn from one another to optimize creativity and productivity. Successful multi-agent systems act as a “digital twin” for your development team, continually generating multiple new concepts and future scenarios. Multi-agent systems don’t replace development and product teams, but instead augment them.
There are many ways to build multi-agent systems, but three popular approaches are:
- Centralized, with one agent in the center that collects and assimilates all the other outputs
- Distributed, where there is no central controller and the agents coordinate directly with one another in an “agent swarm”
- Hierarchical, where agents are organized in teams or hierarchical layers
For product development teams, a centralized or hierarchical architecture works best, as they provide more control over the process. Think of each Gen AI agent as a person who would be expert in one thing on a human team. You can create a separate AI agent for each part of a product development process: product brainstorming, customer segmentation, technical specs, features, capabilities, etc. The central agent, at the center of the spoke or at the end of a hierarchy, takes all the outputs from the other agents into consideration to “spit out” great product ideas.
Collect Data in a Vectorized Database
Now that you’ve chosen a structure for your multi-agent framework and built multiple agents for each part of the product ideation process, you need to put the agents to work. First, give select agents access to external databases of relevant knowledge. To do this, you need to pull in lots of proprietary data from your company: customer segments, product info, research, etc. You may also want to pull in relevant external sources of data that you’d like your agent to use.
This could be global market trends, pricing reports, or public datasets, for example, and could also include scraping Reddit and other forums for more qualitative data on consumer behavior and preferences. To make sure your agents get access to all of this data from one place, you will need a vector database that your agent can access. Pinecone is a popular vector database due to its flexibility and quality of documentation, but there are lots of options on the market.
Write Smart Prompts for Each Agent
The next step is to create unique prompts for each agent. This can take some practice and iteration, but the best way to get started is to decide on a thought framework and persona that you want each agent to follow. For example, you may want a user researcher agent that is an expert at contextualizing user research and searches your vectorized database for user quotes that will help it understand a certain type of user. Once you have a persona for an agent, create prompts with structure. The agent should have specific instructions on what you want the output to look like, down to the number of examples it returns. This helps you get more out of your agent and allows it to work more efficiently with the other agents in the system.
What should your prompts say and how in-depth should they be? This part of the equation is infinitely flexible, since there are endless possibilities to structure your prompts to shape the desired outputs. Lean into your knowledge base on product development, business frameworks, and user-centered design to create the most dynamic and specific prompts possible.
Get the Agents Working Together
To get your agents working together in a coordinated way, it pays to deploy a tool for that purpose. Three popular tools used for connecting multiple agents are CrewAI , LangChain, and Microsoft Autogen. They each have their own set of benefits, so we recommend looking at each and finding the solution that is right for your project.
Once your prompts are fine-tuned, your multi-agent system should start spitting out product designs and scenarios. And you can make those scenarios come to life as wireframes for websites, full product specs, and digital prototypes by connecting the multi-agent system to other GenAI tools like Dall-E — to create prototype images and animations — as well as Relume.io, which generates Figma exportable wireframes in seconds.
Test the Prototypes
Once your multi-agent system has generated several complete product prototypes, it’s time to test which iterations would be most likely to succeed. While you can do traditional A/B testing and collect feedback from real people, you can also use another agent to create AI-driven personas, or “synthetic users,” to test out the different products. Synthetic users can be highly realistic; you can create AI personas that have all the traits of your target users by ingesting CRM, segmentation data, and industry reports, and then ask these personas, which are also AI agents, for their feedback by instructing them to “think and act like your persona.” Thus, a multi-agent system could powerfully supplement aspects of user validation testing.
Multi-agent GenAI systems can greatly enhance and accelerate the process of ideating, designing, and testing new products. By combining expertise from different AI agents focused on areas like customer research, technical specifications, prototyping, and testing, multi-agent systems can quickly generate comprehensive product concepts tailored to the needs of specific customer segments. With these powerful systems at the ready, you can supercharge your team’s ability to move fast and reach innovative product outcomes.
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Multi-agent Gen AI systems can greatly enhance and accelerate the process of ideating, designing, and testing new products.