Why Falling AI Prices Aren't Lowering Enterprise AI Bills
Unite, Friday, September 11th, 2026
Inference costs fell 90 percent in two years while enterprise bills rose, because agentic workflows waste tokens.
Despite LLM inference costs falling roughly 90 percent over two years, enterprise AI bills have not come down.
The article attributes the gap to token waste in agentic workflows, where each step re-sends accumulated context, retries multiply consumption and no governance layer measures what is being spent on what.
Per-token price is the wrong unit of analysis when the token count per task grows faster than the price falls. The recommended controls are context governance, measuring cost per completed task rather than per call, and treating context length as a design constraint.