Multi-agent workflows are often too slow and costly because every step requires an expensive LLM to 'think'. Nemotron's efficient architecture, combining sparse computation and Mamba-based processing, is specifically designed to make this continuous, step-by-step reasoning affordable at scale, tackling a critical bottleneck for agentic AI.

To combat rising AI costs, firms are creating hybrid systems that use cheaper "worker" models for routine tasks while delegating complex problems to powerful "advisor" models. This approach, used by Harvey and explored by Microsoft, can outperform state-of-the-art models alone for a fraction of the cost.

A cost-saving workflow is emerging where developers use expensive frontier models for high-level "thinking" and planning stages of a complex task. Once the plan is established, the more routine and high-volume execution steps are routed to cheaper, often open-source, models to optimize both performance and cost.

Running premium AI models constantly is prohibitively expensive. A cost-effective strategy is to use a cheaper model as a "manager" to understand a high-level goal, break it down, and then delegate the execution of sub-tasks to multiple, short-lived "child" sessions running more powerful models.

Instead of relying on one powerful model for all tasks, the leading strategy is 'smart routing'—using a panel of models and directing each task to the most appropriate one. This compound architecture demonstrably beats single frontier models on both cost and performance.

Instead of relying on a single large AI model, companies are adopting "model orchestration" to control costs. This involves using a router to send prompts to the most appropriate model based on the task, often cascading from cheap, small models to more expensive ones only when necessary.

Jerry Murdock predicts agents will use an orchestration layer to triage tasks, selecting the best LLM for each job—like expensive Claude for reasoning and cheap open-source models for simple tasks. This shifts value from the models themselves to the agent's intelligent orchestration capabilities.

A hybrid approach to AI agent architecture is emerging. Use the most powerful, expensive cloud models like Claude for high-level reasoning and planning (the "CEO"). Then, delegate repetitive, high-volume execution tasks to cheaper, locally-run models (the "line workers").

A production AI agent performs tasks of varying difficulty. Forcing all requests through a single, expensive frontier model is inefficient. A better architecture routes tasks to the most appropriate model: small, cheap open models for high-volume, low-difficulty work like retrieval, reserving the costly frontier API only for high-stakes reasoning where it matters.