AI Inference Is Getting Cheaper, but Your Agents Are Getting More Expensive
Computerworld, Tuesday, August 18th, 2026
Gartner expects token costs to fall 95% by 2030 while agentic workflow inference costs rise more than fivefold by 2028.
Computerworld examines the divergence between falling LLM token costs and rising total AI workload costs. Gartner research predicts token costs will fall by 95% by 2030, while inference costs for agentic workflows increase more than fivefold over the next two years.
The cause is agents that reason, replan, call other agents and work continuously in the background rather than answering a single prompt. Each of those behaviors multiplies token consumption per unit of work delivered.
The article is aimed at teams whose AI budgets assume unit price declines will cover growth.