自动化不是免费午餐，token 也会变成成本中心
The corporate narrative around artificial intelligence has long emphasized frictionless efficiency: software agents would digest documents, coordinate workflows, draft correspondence and liberate employees from bureaucratic drudgery. The invoice for that liberation is now becoming harder to overlook.
Agentic systems are expensive because they rarely perform a single isolated action. They decompose tasks, consult tools, retrieve context, revise failed outputs and generate long chains of intermediate tokens, each of which consumes scarce computing capacity and ultimately appears somewhere in a budget.
Inspired by public The Economist article clues · Rewritten by Vocabsavvy · Vocabsavvy Original (public-snippet inspired)