AI Agent Costs Are Becoming a Concern for Companies

The Companies Getting the Most From AI Are Also Feeling the Cost

Companies are increasing their AI spending, but the cost of running agents is starting to shape how far they can take adoption.

Sep 24, 2026

by David Adubiina

18% of AI high performers say coding-agent costs have constrained their use compared with 6% of other companies.
37% say AI has contributed positively to EBIT, showing that greater AI adoption is not yet translating into stronger company-wide financial returns.
Nearly 75% have redesigned workflows around AI, suggesting that companies getting more from AI are changing how they work.

The companies getting the most value out of AI agents are also the ones feeling the cost of using them most. A new McKinsey survey finds that so-called AI “high performers,” organizations seeing real financial returns from the technology, are nearly three times more likely than other companies to say the cost of software coding agents has constrained their use of them, at 18% versus 6%.

More broadly, one in five respondents say AI-related operating costs, including token spending, have already limited how their organization uses the technology.

Yet this is hardly slowing down the financial commitment firms are pouring in. Most companies plan to spend more on AI, not less: 60% expect to increase their investment over the next year, while high performers are more than twice as likely as other companies to already spend more than 15% of their tech budget on AI.

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AI Adoption Is Growing, Along With the Bill

“CFOs and chief AI officers are increasingly talking about ‘tokenomics’ and the ROI of AI,” Michael Chui, a senior fellow at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, wrote in the report.

He noted that AI “isn’t ‘too cheap to meter’” for agentic software development. Even as the price per token has fallen, the number of tokens organizations are using has climbed even faster.

The findings come from McKinsey’s latest Global Survey on the State of AI, which polled 1,719 participants across 97 nations between May and June 2026, weighted by each country’s share of global GDP. Just over a third of respondents work at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.