Orchestration design cuts enterprise AI token costs by 41% in controlled study

This article presents a formal analysis of token economics in enterprise agentic AI, arguing that the orchestration layer (the "harness") is the decisive lever against "token maxing" — the pattern where tokens per task grow faster than task value. Through controlled experiments with 22 locked evaluation tasks and six foundation models, the authors demonstrate that swapping only the orchestration layer (a conventional production loop vs. the Writer Agent Harness) cuts blended cost per task by 41%, median wall-clock time by 44%, and tokens per task by 38%, while maintaining task-completion quali