Gartner forecasts fivefold rise in AI agent costs by 2028

Tokens are getting cheaper, but Gartner says agentic workflows will burn through so many of them that total inference costs still climb AI is getting cheaper to run. AI is also getting more expensive to run. According to Gartner, both statements are true at the same time. In a forecast released on August 17, 2026, the research firm predicted that inference costs per agentic workflow will rise by more than fivefold through 2028 . That is happening even as the price of each individual token falls sharply.

Source: Crypto Briefing