Enterprise AI bills are arriving, and the numbers are surprising. Pegasystems launched a pricing architecture at PegaWorld this week designed to decouple agentic AI from per-token LLM costs — and released survey data showing that the companies actually succeeding with agentic AI have one thing in common: they rethought their processes first.
At PegaWorld in Las Vegas on 9 June, Pegasystems announced that clients can now design, build and run agentic workflows across Pega Infinity 26 without paying per token. The company's Pega Predictable AI architecture shifts the heavy reasoning to design time, so runtime agents operate with reduced token consumption and — Pega says — more reliable outcomes. The announcement is a direct response to a market shift: LLM providers are converting flat-rate subscriptions to metered, token-based pricing while reasoning-heavy background processes rack up costs quietly.
Research released alongside the announcement, conducted with Savanta across more than 100 UK enterprise business and IT decision makers who have already deployed agentic AI, fills in the context. Ninety-eight percent of successful implementations had fundamentally rethought existing processes — not added AI to them. Fifty-seven percent had done so to a significant extent, redesigning workflows to align with what agents make possible rather than retrofitting AI into legacy patterns.
The research identified consistent, predictable outcomes as the primary objective: 63% said their top deployment goal was to automate and simplify complex processes so they work reliably across systems. That same proportion reported their deployments had delivered on it. The gap between those who had fully understood the value of agentic AI and those who hadn't was stark — 56% pointed to insufficient resources as a barrier, and 59% cited limited knowledge of what agentic AI can actually deliver.
The cultural dimension is also in the data. Eighty-five percent of successful implementers said business and IT teams were willing to embrace new technology and explore new possibilities — a finding Pega frames as a precondition for making process rethinking work at scale.
Pegasystems (NASDAQ: PEGA) is listed as the Enterprise Transformation Company and counts large financial services, healthcare and insurance organisations among its primary customer base.
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