The Stochastic Tax: Why Your AI Agent Is a Financial Liability (And How to Fix It)

Most companies are bleeding 40% of their AI budget on infinite loops, re-summarization, and hallucinated tool calls. Here's how to kill the waste. The LLM called the same database lookup tool 7 times. Re-summarized the conversation context 4 times. Hallucinated a tool that doesn't exist, retried, then finally made a decision. Total tokens: 47,000. Cost: $12.40. Latency: 8.3 seconds. User abandoned the session before the response arrived. This is the Stochastic Tax.