AI Weekly Malaysia

Gartner forecasts agentic AI workflow costs will rise more than fivefold by end of 2028 because complex agent workflows consume far more tokens than chatbots, outweighing per-token price drops. Routing a single task to an agentic reasoning model increases inference costs at least fivefold, and usage-based billing models make runaway costs worse. Gartner separately predicted 40% of organizations will demote or decommission AI agents due to these and other problems.

Why: If you are building or budgeting AI agents, do not assume falling token prices will keep your costs flat—agent workflows that constantly reason, route, and self-question multiply token consumption. You should plan for model routing (assigning each task to the cheapest capable model) and set hard cost guardrails before deploying agents under usage-based billing, or expect bills to scale non-linearly with workflow complexity.