Northwestern's Manling Li introduces BAGEN, finding frontier LLM agents consistently overestimate their token budgets and waste resources on failing tasks

Proud to share our work on BAGEN: Are LLM Agents Budget-Aware?

As AI agents move from demos into real enterprise workflows, the question is no longer just whether an agent can finish a task. The harder question is whether it knows what it is spending along the way.

In electronic production, budget means cost, time, capacity, margin, supplier risk, and operational judgment. At O₂ AI, this is exactly the kind of problem we care about: building agents that can make decisions under real-world constraints, not just generate answers.

A production-ready enterprise agent should know when to continue, when to stop, when to escalate, and how to improve from every transaction.

That is why budget awareness matters.

Grateful to work with an incredible team of researchers and builders on this. Thanks @wzenus @ManlingLi_ and the whole team for making this work possible. Excited to keep pushing toward reliable, constraint-aware agents for real industrial decision-making!