The unit metrics, margins, and cost models of agentic AI. · 55 articles
Most agent vendors talk about autonomy like it's a switch, the agent is "autonomous" or it isn't. In practice it's a dial, and right now no
Reasoning tokens, the hidden internal "thinking" a model does before it answers, can cost 5x to 20x more than the visible output on a sing
Reliability in an agentic system isn't free and it isn't a feature you bolt on at the end. It's a recurring per-task expense that lives insi
The flashy line items in an agent's cost structure get all the attention: which frontier model you picked, how many tool calls fired, whethe
Token prices have collapsed by roughly 80-95% per million tokens over the past two years, yet most teams running production agents report th
In agent products, customers rarely cancel before they quietly start taking over. Long before a logo churns, the human-intervention rate, t
Agent spend doesn't drift the way SaaS bills do, it lurches. A single bad prompt, a retry storm, or a sub-agent that won't stop spawning ca