Communication to Completion: Modeling Collaborative Workflows with Intelligent Multi-Agent Communication

Multi-agent LLM systems have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex collaborative tasks, yet most frameworks treat communication as instantaneous and free, overlooking a fundamental constraint in real world teamwork, collaboration cost. We propose a scalable framework implemented via Communication to Completion (C2C), which explicitly models communication as a constrained resource with realistic temporal costs. We introduce the Alignment Factor (AF), a dynamic metric inspired by Shared Mental Models, to quantify the link between task understanding and work efficiency. Through experiments on 15 software engineering workflows spanning three complexity tiers and team sizes from 5 to 17 agents, we demonstrate that cost-aware strategies achieve over 40% higher efficiency compared to unconstrained interaction. Our analysis reveals emergent coordination patterns: agents naturally adopt manager centric hub-and-spoke topologies, strategically escalate from asynchronous to synchronous channels based on complexity, and prioritize high value help requests. These patterns remain consistent across multiple frontier models (GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro). This study moves beyond simple agent construction, offering a theoretical foundation for quantifying and optimizing the dynamics of collaboration in future digital workplaces.