Your AI Agent Is Sending 10x More API Calls Than You Think — Here's Where the Cost Hides

The hidden multiplier nobody budgets for When we moved from single-turn chatbots to agentic workflows in early 2026, the first thing that broke wasn't the code — it was the budget spreadsheet. A simple chat completion costs one API call. An agent that plans, selects tools, executes them, evaluates the results, and synthesizes a final answer? That same user request now triggers 5 to 20 LLM calls . Sometimes more. I ran an experiment last month with a production agent doing research tasks — web se