New video of Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon: AI will require “gazillions” of tokens.
Because, Agentic AI will consume dramatically more tokens because it performs autonomous tasks, uses multiple systems, and interacts with tools.
AI demand will grow hugely when software starts letting agents act, not just answer.
A chatbot spends tokens on language; an agent spends tokens on deciding, checking, calling tools, reading outputs, revising plans, and coordinating with other software.
Today a single human-AI exchange may be large, a reasoning task may be much larger, but we are already entering the agentic era, where an autonomous workflow can become exponentially larger still because the model is no longer producing one response.
It is running a process.
When a SaaS product redesigns itself around human-agent interaction, every task can become a chain of hidden micro-decisions, and each micro-decision consumes context, memory, tool calls, verification, and output tokens.
Another point is people hear “more tokens” and think only of bigger data centers, when the deeper change is economic: software usage may stop being measured mainly by clicks, seats, or sessions.
It will be measured by how much machine reasoning/tokens gets spent on behalf of each user.
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From "Reuters" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
Goldman Sachs: "Token use by AI agents is expected to multiply 24 times by 2030"
AI agents are now creating the first serious cost test for the AI boom. As was reported this week, Uber and Microsoft are already rethinking expensive agent usage.
A chatbot may answer once, but an agent plans, calls tools, checks results, edits mistakes, and repeats the loop.
That loop can make one user request consume 10x, 50x, or even far more tokens than a normal answer.
Goldman’s bullish case is that monthly token use could reach 120 quadrillion by 2030, while inference cost per token keeps falling 60%-70% per year.
The fight is now between agent productivity and token waste.
Earlier this month, Microsoft began revoking developer access to Claude Code, with plans to move them to its in-house Copilot Command Line Interface tool by June 30. The company has framed this as consolidating teams around its own tools, but the timing at the fiscal year’s end hints it may also be about lowering costs.