Gagan Bansal

Gagan Bansal

Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research

I build AI agent systems and study how to keep humans in control of them.

AutoGen Co-lead

One of the most widely adopted open-source multi-agent frameworks, now the core of Microsoft Agent Framework.

GitHub

MarkItDown Co-lead

Convert any file to Markdown for LLM pipelines.

GitHub

Magentic-One Co-lead

Generalist multi-agent system evaluated on GAIA and WebArena for complex web and file tasks.

Paper

Magentic-UI Co-lead

Human-centered web agent with co-planning and guardrails.

GitHub

Magentic Marketplace Co-lead

Collaboration with economists studying what happens when AI agents participate in two-sided markets.

GitHub

Selected papers. Full list on Google Scholar

2025
Magentic-UI: Human-in-the-loop Agentic Systems Tech Report Web agents need human oversight. We built one that plans with users and asks before acting.
2025
Magentic Marketplace: Studying Agentic Markets Tech Report When AI agents buy and sell on our behalf, markets change. We built a simulation to study how.
2025
Challenges in Human-Agent Communication Tech Report Agents fail in ways chatbots don't. We identify the communication breakdowns and propose fixes.
2025
Generation Probabilities Are Not Enough: Uncertainty in Code Completions ToCHI Model confidence scores don't help programmers spot bad suggestions. Highlighting uncertain tokens does.
2024
AutoGen: Multi-Agent Conversation Framework COLM Best Paper, ICLR Workshop LLMs work better in teams. We built a framework that lets multiple agents collaborate through conversation.
2024
Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System Tech Report One agent struggles with complex tasks. Five specialized agents, orchestrated together, achieve state-of-the-art.
2024
Reading Between the Lines: AI-Assisted Programming CHI Honorable Mention We measured how programmers actually use Copilot. A large amount of time goes to verifying suggestions, not writing code. Check out the visuals based on real usage data.
2021
Does the Whole Exceed its Parts? AI Explanations and Team Performance CHI AI explanations help, but not always. They work when humans can catch AI mistakes, not just agree with them.

Now

Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers. I co-created AutoGen, one of the most widely adopted open-source frameworks for multi-agent systems, now the foundation of Microsoft's Agent Framework. I then co-led Magentic-One, a generalist system we rigorously evaluated on benchmarks like GAIA and WebArena for complex tasks requiring reasoning, web browsing, and code execution. Building these systems exposed how hard the human side of agents is—we identified twelve fundamental challenges in human-agent communication, from conveying what an agent is about to do, to managing the tension between transparency and information overload. This shaped my subsequent work: Magentic-UI, which I co-led to bring human oversight directly into the agentic loop through co-planning and action guards, and more recently, research on societies of agentsMagentic Marketplace, a collaboration with economists studying what happens when agents participate in two-sided markets at scale.

Before

Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Washington, advised by Dan Weld. My earlier research focused on human-AI decision making—how AI explanations affect team performance and how to update AI systems without breaking user trust. During my PhD, I interned at Microsoft Research with Besmira Nushi, Ece Kamar, and Eric Horvitz. B.Tech from IIT Delhi, where I worked with Mausam on natural language processing.