Monthly Agentic Briefing

PRO-Agentic Briefing: Token Maxing vs Budget Maxing

‍As AI agents move from experiments into real workflows, leaders face a new question: how do you get useful agentic work done without every task defaulting to the biggest model, longest context, and most expensive path?Over the past PRO-Agentic Briefings, we’ve explored the rise of coding agents, Agent OS, harness engineering, and persistent agents that can keep context, wait, resume, monitor, and act over time.

This month, Gary C Tate will focus on the cost and design decisions that come next.When agents start running workflows, it can be tempting to give them more of everything: more context, more tools, more thinking time, and more powerful models. Sometimes that is worth it. But as workflows scale, leaders need to understand when “more” creates better output  and when it simply creates unnecessary cost.In this session, we’ll explore:• When token maxing makes sense• When more context, tools, and thinking time become waste• How to choose the right model and effort level for the task• How to think about stopping points in agent workflows• What leaders should watch before agentic systems become expensive background activity

‍This session is useful if you are starting to use agents more seriously and want to understand how to design workflows that are effective, scalable, and cost-aware.