Your AI Agent Works. That's Why Finance Is About to Kill It.

Two teams deployed the same multi-agent workflow last quarter. One costs $0.12 per run . The other costs $1.40 . Same model. Same task. Same outcome quality. The $1.40 team had a polished POC, a demo that crushed, and a board deck full of green checkmarks. Six weeks into production, finance pulled the plug. The $0.12 team is now serving ten times the volume on a smaller infrastructure budget than the original pilot. This gap does not come from model choice, prompt quality, or engineering talent.