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ZDNET's key takeaways
Token-maxing to support agentic AI is unsustainable.
Business leaders must create a strategy for token use.
Give people room to explore agents within guidelines.
Twelve months in AI is an eternity. Steve Lucas, CEO at integration technology specialist Boomi, was concerned last year that CIOs were rushing into gen AI initiatives without a clear sense of direction. Now, a year later, he's concerned that IT professionals are taking a similarly rushed approach with agentic technology, and the scale of token usage is only going one way: upward.
"Whether you work inside or outside a company, it feels like your core hustle is to use AI and you token max the heck out of that technology for your own job," he said to ZDNET.
Also: The 3 types of people who will excel in the AI agent era, according to tech leaders
A token is the fundamental unit of information processed by an AI model, and research points to the soaring and unpredictable costs of agents as the technology consumes orders of magnitude more tokens.
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