Every loop, retry and failed handoff is billable reasoning. Gartner's forecast shows why your messiest contacts are now your costliest.

The Gist

Inference paradox. Gartner forecasts AI inference costs per agentic workflow will rise more than fivefold through 2028, even as token prices fall.

Compounding multipliers. Reasoning agents can cost up to 150 times more than a simple chatbot to complete the same task.

Service exposure. High contact volumes, multi-turn loops, failed handoffs and usage-based billing concentrate the cost risk in customer service.

Tiered design. Routing each contact reason to the cheapest model that can resolve it, with a capped reasoning budget, keeps agent costs bounded.

Every AI business case I have reviewed in the last two years rests on the same unspoken assumption: that cost per interaction falls over time. Models get cheaper, tokens get cheaper, therefore the economics improve on their own.…