Gartner says agent workflow costs will increase 5 times or more
The price of each token falls, but agent workflows use many more tokens, and the total cost goes up.
On 17 August 2026, Gartner said that the inference cost of each agent workflow will increase. The increase is more than 5 times through 2028. Analyst Will Sommer says a reasoning agent costs 5 times more than a chatbot answer, or more.
Gartner says an agentic workflow costs 5x to 30x a basic chatbot exchange, even as the price of each token falls.
