Cost versus value: managing the performance of agentic AI systems

By McKinsey & Company (Dan Tinkoff and Lieven Van der Veken, global leaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey).

This McKinsey Quarterly issue presents a piece titled "Cost versus value: Managing agentic AI system performance," focused on how companies should measure what they actually pay for generative AI and, in particular, for agentic AI systems.

The central idea the email previews is that price per token has ceased to be a useful metric for capturing the real cost companies incur when deploying generative AI. According to the teaser, this is addressed through a conversation with David Tepper, CEO of Pay-i, who delves into the new measurement economics said to be emerging to assess the spending and value of these systems.

The email does not develop further substantive content in the body of the message: it is a promotional email that links to the full article on McKinsey's website, so no further concrete details (figures, examples, or specific findings) are available without accessing the original article.

In addition, the newsletter includes an "Also Consider" section with two related pieces: "Frontiers of compute: The technologies to reduce AI inference costs" and "Where AI will create value—and where it won't," which address related topics of compute infrastructure for inference and where AI will generate value.