# The Next AI Crisis Won’t Be Hallucinations. It Will Be Costs

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/a-beginner-s-guide-to-ai-6564486/the-next-ai-crisis-won-t-be-hallucinations-it-will-be-costs
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/a-beginner-s-guide-to-ai-6564486/the-next-ai-crisis-won-t-be-hallucinations-it-will-be-costs.md
Podcast: [A Beginner's Guide to AI](https://stenobird.com/podcast/a-beginner-s-guide-to-ai-6564486)
Published: 2026-07-18T20:53:32+00:00
Episode link: https://shows.acast.com/beginners-guide-to-ai/episodes/the-next-ai-crisis-wont-be-hallucinations-it-will-be-costs
Audio file: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/6953b9ead0c0aeaf12bcbd70/e/6a5be60b78e0412bc686061b/media.mp3
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Duration seconds: 534

## Resource

AI agents can conduct research, analyze interviews, retrieve documents, call tools, and complete complex workflows with limited human involvement. But every prompt, response, document, retry, and agent iteration consumes tokens. When nobody monitors that consumption, a valuable AI experiment can quickly become an unexpected business expense. In this episode of The Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer shares a real example from a university startup. A researcher was developing an AI-supported process for qualitative interview analysis using retrieval-augmented generation, Claude, and a sequence of approximately 70 prompts. The research was valuable. The bill was also noticeable. Within one week, the project generated approximately $180 in token costs. That may be acceptable for an important scientific project, but it raises a much larger question: What happens when dozens or hundreds of employees begin running similar AI agents? 📈 AI agents do not behave like occasional chatbot users. They can process large amounts of information, make repeated API calls, use tools, retry failed steps, and continue working through multiple iterations. Poorly configured agents can even enter loops, repeating the same operations until somebody intervenes. Every iteration costs additional tokens. For businesses selling AI services, this creates a potential problem with fixed-price subscriptions. A customer paying a modest monthly fee may generate API costs that are many times higher than the subscription revenue. For other companies, the problem is internal. Employees may be encouraged to use AI, but managers may have limited visibility into which teams, models, agents, and workflows are generating the costs. The solution is not to stop using AI. Employees who barely use the available t…

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