Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon states agentic AI will consume dramatically more tokens than chatbots due to autonomous tasks, tool use, and iterative processes. Goldman Sachs projects token use by AI agents to multiply 24 times by 2030, potentially reaching 120 quadrillion monthly tokens. This shift redefines software usage metrics from clicks/seats to machine reasoning/token expenditure, creating a serious cost test for the AI boom.
Agentic AI's token-intensive workflows will drive exponential demand for inference compute, shifting software's economic model to token consumption.