Vijay Poudel

We keep talking about AI agent costs as: model price tokens requests

But agentic systems add another cost: uncontrolled execution.

• An agent retries a tool 5 times.

• Calls an expensive model when a cheaper one would work.

• Loops through unnecessary steps. Hits APIs it didn't need.

• Delegates work to another agent.

We re giving agents access to APIs, databases, CRMs, payments and internal systems.

But something feels missing.

We can observe what an agent did.
We can evaluate whether it was right.
We can detect a policy violation.

Imagine an AI agent handling customer refunds.

It checks the order.
It calls the payment system.
It decides the refund amount.
It executes the refund.

Everything looks fine.