Agentic AI's hidden TCO: token fees and middleware can eat the labor savings
Autonomous marketing agents sell themselves on killing manual labor, but their cost model is wildly different from fixed per-seat SaaS. Every task burns tokens and API calls, and background loops that parse live databases add variable spend nobody budgeted for. The piece walks MOps leaders through modeling true TCO, from forecasting token volume to pricing the middleware engineering and QA required to glue agents to CRMs and ad networks. Get the math right before rollout, or your AI workforce quietly outspends the humans it replaced.