DeepSeek just cut V4-Pro pricing by 75%, a move that should have handed enterprise AI vendors a margin party. Instead, it revealed the 100x problem: agent systems are consuming tokens faster than prices are falling. A chatbot turns one user question into a single model call; an agent turns it into a chain of planning, retrieval, tool use, verification, summarization, and follow-up decisions. The user sees one answer; the vendor pays for the whole pipeline.

| Workload | Typical...