Agents spawning other agents, agents operating in the background on every task, and agent swarms will consume 1,000X more tokens than people prompting agents 1 at a time.
The usage of AI as a chat system that can only work for you at the pace that you can prompt it will seem like a relic within a year or two. The vast, vast majority of tokens will be consumed by agents that are just doing continuous work for us in the background and in our workflows.
This is why we’re still so early in the curve of AI agent adoption right now, and how much more compute and infrastructure build out will be needed to sustain this.