Agentic Workflows Eat 1000x the Tokens. Budget Accordingly.

An agent is not a query. It is a thousand queries in a trench coat. Autonomous agents run multi-step loops. Each step reads context and produces output, and the tokens compound.

Reporting around the recent spending blowups put agentic consumption at roughly a thousand times a single query. That is why bills detonate when a team flips from chat to agents without re-forecasting.

Budget on loops, not seats

Model agent cost per task and per run, not per headcount. Cap the number of loops an agent can take. Use a cheaper model for the inner steps and reserve the expensive one for the final reasoning. Watch the turn count as closely as the token count, because turns are where runaway cost hides.