AI will require “gazillions” of tokens.

- Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon:

Agentic AI will consume dramatically more tokens because it performs autonomous tasks, uses multiple systems, and interacts with tools.

A chatbot spends tokens on language; an agent spends tokens on deciding, checking, calling tools, reading outputs, revising plans, and coordinating with other software.

So, AI demand will grow hugely when software starts letting agents act, not just answer.

Today a single human-AI exchange may be large, a reasoning task may be much larger, but we are already entering the agentic era, where an autonomous workflow can become exponentially larger still because the model is no longer producing one response.

It is running a process.

When a SaaS product redesigns itself around human-agent interaction, every task can become a chain of hidden micro-decisions, and each micro-decision consumes context, memory, tool calls, verification, and output tokens.

Another point is people hear “more tokens” and think only of bigger data centers, when the deeper change is economic: software usage may stop being measured mainly by clicks, seats, or sessions.

It will be measured by how much machine reasoning/tokens gets spent on behalf of each user.

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From "Reuters" YouTube channel, (link in comment)