Your agentic workflows are wasting your tokens. They’re wasting your money repeatedly for an orchestration loop. Here’s how you fix it and make your workflows 100x cheaper (yes, 100x cheaper).
In fact in testing it was found to be 128x, 296x, and 462x cheaper in the three tested domains, so 100x is an understatement.
The paper this research has come from has been written by Simon Dennis, Riviaan Patil, Kevin Shabahang, & Hao Guo from the University of Melbourne (I’ll link the paper in full at the end).
This article is going to tell you how to utilise their research so that you can make your agentic workflows 100x cheaper and the contents of this article is the following:
1. Why your agentic workflow costs so much
1. The one idea to take away
1. How it's actually done (theory)
1. Does it hold up?
1. Run your own numbers (find how much it cost)
1. Is this for you?
1. Full build guide
This guide can make your conversations up to 462x cheaper whilst keeping 87-98% of the frontier quality kept, so let's get started!
## 1: Why your agentic workflow costs so much
Okay, so you have a fixed procedure - an agentic workflow.
Then you have where this agentic workflow lives and depending on that single choice is exactly what drives the cost of your agentic workflow.
A: Orchestration
This is the most common setup you see today, this is where software sits on top of the model and, every single turn, injects instructions and decides where the conversation goes next.
The cost? $0.05-0.17 per conversation.
B: In-context
This is the "just prompt it" route, this is where you paste the whole workflow into the model's system prompt and you let it run yourself.
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