AI models can now take a million tokens in a single prompt, so it’s fair to ask why an agent still needs a layer that hunts down the few relevant passages before it answers. Narrowing first is cheaper and more accurate and it keeps you free to change AI vendors later.
AI token economics connects model usage to the real cost of running an AI application. In this article, we’ll trace token consumption through a RAG pipeline and explore how teams can estimate and manage those costs.