TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

The full cost of running an AI agent in production, including LLM inference, vector database and storage, observability, integration maintenance, human-in-the-loop review time, and ongoing evaluation. Sticker-price comparisons of per-token API cost frequently mislead buyers—TCO is what actually hits the budget. For most production agents, inference is 30–50% of TCO; the rest is infrastructure, ops, and human oversight.