5 Agentic AI Trade-Offs to Consider Before Production
InfoWorld, Wednesday, October 14th, 2026
A practitioner lays out the latency, accuracy, cost and model-size trade-offs teams should settle before building agents.
Drawing on many agentic AI projects, the author says teams often expect SaaS-like responsiveness from agents whose plan, tool call, check and retry steps add latency, and he recommends starting conversations by comparing what 2-second and 20-second responses deliver.
Because optimizing speed, accuracy and cost at once is rarely possible, teams should fix an accuracy baseline first and then tune speed and cost.
Prompt caching with static content at the start of prompts can cut costs significantly, and smaller models suit simple tasks.
In one project, however, a switch gained 5 seconds but lost 11 accuracy points.