AI Agents Aren't Cheap, Even With Falling Model Costs: Gartner
ARN, Tuesday, August 18th, 2026
Gartner predicts AI inference costs per agentic workflow will rise more than fivefold by 2028 despite better token economics.
ARN reports Gartner's finding that improving token economics alone will not prevent overall AI costs from rising.
The analyst firm predicts AI inference costs per agentic workflow will increase more than fivefold by 2028.
The driver is organizations moving from assistive AI features and chatbots to increasingly complex, multistep agentic execution. Each step in an agentic workflow consumes tokens, so falling unit prices are outrun by rising consumption.
The finding is aimed at organizations budgeting AI on the assumption that model price declines will absorb growth.