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Sep 10, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Agent Cost Optimization: Cut Waste, Not Intelligence

This article reveals three major sources of waste in AI agent workflows — redundant context recomputation, outdated prompt patterns, and misallocated reasoning effort — and provides a systematic optimization framework with caching strategies, prompt auditing, effort calibration, and holdout-set validation, demonstrating 50–73% cost reductions without performance loss across benchmarks.