arxivcs.AI2026-07-08
The Harness Effect: How Orchestration Design Sets the Token Economics of Enterprise Agentic AI
Muayad Sayed Ali, Aliaksandra Novik, Anji Boddupally, Artem Yavorskyi, Chris Nickerson, Daniel Rica, et al.
Agentic AI development today runs on token maxing: buying capability with tokens -- longer reasoning traces, more turns, wider tool payloads, bigger replayed contexts -- so tokens per task grow faster than task value. Falling per-token prices mask the pattern; total spend rises a…