How to Stop AI Agent Cost Blowups Before They Happen

You deploy a four-agent pipeline that should cost about $0.80 per run. By end of day it has burned through $47 on a single stuck researcher loop. Sound familiar? If you're running AI agents in production, cost blowups are not a question of if but when. 57% of organizations already have agents in production, yet 90% of agent projects fail within 30 days - and runaway LLM costs are the number one pain point. The core problem: agents make autonomous decisions about how many LLM calls to issue.