The Bottleneck Is Moving
As inference-optimized silicon ships in greater volume, the per-token cost of running an always-on agent has kept falling, and several teams building agent products report compute is no longer their top-line cost constraint — integration work and reliability engineering now dominate their budgets instead.
What Cheaper Inference Unlocks
Lower cost per call makes previously uneconomical patterns viable: agents that re-verify their own output with a second pass, agents that poll for state changes instead of relying on webhooks, and agents that run continuously rather than only on demand.
The Catch
Cheaper compute does not reduce the engineering cost of making an agent trustworthy — the auth, rate-limiting, and verification work needed to safely let an agent act autonomously scales with what the agent is allowed to touch, not with how cheap its inference is.