MIT and Microsoft's Murakkab Research Aims to Speed Up AI Agents While Cutting Energy Use

Researchers at MIT and Microsoft Azure have published work on a system called Murakkab, an Urdu word meaning "a composition of things," that focuses on improving speed and reducing energy use in multistep AI workflows. The research addresses a critical challenge as AI agents become more complex: the computational cost of running extended reasoning and action chains.

Published via MIT News on June 25, 2026 and presented at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2026), the Murakkab research targets the heart of agentic AI systems. A multistep workflow might include retrieval, planning, tool use, validation, and output generation. If that chain becomes cheaper and faster, entire business models become easier to sustain.

What Happened: MIT and Microsoft's Murakkab Research

Researchers led by MIT EECS graduate student Gohar Chaudhry, with MIT associate professor Adam Belay and Microsoft Azure Technical Fellow and Corporate VP Ricardo Bianchini as senior author, introduced Murakkab, a system designed to optimize the execution of multistep AI agent workflows. The research specifically addresses speed, cost, accuracy and energy efficiency, the factors that determine whether agentic AI can scale economically.

"Agentic workflows are getting very complicated and quickly becoming the backbone of what cloud providers are doing," Chaudhry said. The work was published through MIT News and gained attention in technology and startup circles as founders and engineers grapple with the operational costs of deploying agent systems at scale.

Key Details

Multistep AI workflows involve sequences of operations where each step may depend on the output of previous steps. A customer service agent might need to retrieve account information, check order status, verify identity, and draft a response, each step consuming compute resources.

Murakkab lets developers describe a workflow's intent in high-level, plain-language terms, such as a video question-answering application that extracts key frames, generates a transcript, and answers user queries, rather than manually specifying which models and tools to wire together. The system then automatically selects the best available models and tools, determines which steps must run sequentially versus which can run in parallel, and optimizes hardware allocation and scheduling at deployment time based on the developer's accuracy, latency and cost constraints. In testing, Murakkab met user requirements using about 35 percent of the computation, about 27 percent of the energy, and less than 25 percent of the cost of traditional approaches; in one case it cut a workflow's energy consumption by more than 10x with only about a 2 percent drop in accuracy.

Why It Matters

Energy use and speed are business issues, not just research concerns. Lower compute waste can reshape pricing, margins, and product design for AI agent systems. A slightly less glamorous model with smarter orchestration can beat a premium model that burns money on every user interaction.

For startups building on agentic AI, Murakkab-type optimizations could determine whether their business models are viable. If each agent task costs too much, the economics of automation break down regardless of how capable the underlying model is.

Industry Context

The AI industry has focused heavily on model capability benchmarks while often ignoring workflow economics. This is changing as more companies move from experimentation to production deployment. Inference costs, not training costs, dominate operational spending for deployed AI services.

Research into agent optimization sits at the intersection of systems engineering and AI. It requires understanding both model behavior and software architecture, making it a specialized field that few organizations have invested in deeply.

What It Means for Users and the Industry

For users of AI-powered services, Murakkab-style optimizations could mean faster responses and lower subscription costs. For the industry, it validates the importance of systems-level research alongside model development.

Founders should track cost per completed task rather than benchmark scores when evaluating agent systems. A model that completes workflows efficiently at lower cost may provide better business value than a more capable but more expensive alternative.

What Happens Next

MIT and Microsoft researchers will likely continue refining Murakkab and may release open-source implementations. Commercial adoption depends on whether the techniques can be integrated with popular agent frameworks like LangChain, AutoGPT, and enterprise platforms, and whether Microsoft chooses to fold any of the approach into Azure's own agent tooling.

Final Takeaway

The Murakkab research highlights an underappreciated dimension of the AI revolution. As agent systems become mainstream, the economics of workflow execution will matter as much as model intelligence. Organizations that optimize both will have sustainable advantages.

Key Points

Energy Consumption in AI Data Centers

The energy consumption of AI data centers has become a critical concern as model sizes and deployment scales increase. Training large models requires gigawatt-hours of electricity, and serving these models to millions of users creates ongoing energy demands that rival those of small countries. The International Energy Agency has projected that data center electricity consumption could double by 2026.

Murakkab's focus on energy efficiency addresses this concern directly. By optimizing agent workflow execution to reduce unnecessary computation, the system can lower the energy footprint of AI operations without sacrificing capability. This is particularly important for multi-step agent workflows where inefficient execution compounds energy consumption across many operations.

The research also has implications for edge deployment. As AI moves from centralized data centers to edge devices like smartphones and IoT sensors, energy efficiency becomes even more critical. Techniques developed for data center optimization may translate to longer battery life and cooler operation on mobile devices.

Broader Implications for Sustainable AI

Murakkab contributes to a growing body of research on sustainable AI. From model compression and quantization to efficient architectures and renewable-powered data centers, the field is increasingly focused on reducing AI's environmental impact. MIT's research adds workflow optimization to this toolkit.

For enterprises, sustainable AI is becoming a business imperative rather than just an ethical consideration. Customers, regulators, and investors are increasingly asking about environmental impact. Companies that can demonstrate efficient AI operations may gain competitive advantages in markets where sustainability matters. Microsoft's direct involvement as a co-author, through Azure Technical Fellow Ricardo Bianchini, also signals that a major cloud provider sees enough commercial relevance in these efficiency gains to invest research time in them rather than treating the work as purely academic.

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