Your Agents Need a Spending Limit

YPO Technology Network AI Brief · Aug 6, 2026 · 9m

For two years, "is your company good at AI" was a question about models and vendors. This episode goes where the answers actually live now: the engineers and operators publishing what works in production, in their own words, with their own numbers. What they have converged on looks nothing like the vendor decks. It looks like treasury management. One operator posted his AI bill and found 84 percent of it was cache traffic, then cut costs roughly in half by restructuring sessions. A SaaS company named Manifest built a four-tier model-routing system, ran it across 7,000 users for four months…