“Open models can do 90 percent of agentic work at a twentieth of the cost of a frontier LLM: Gartner”

Key points

• Gartner estimates most agentic workflow steps are routine and can be handled by open-weight models.
• Open-weight models deliver parity with cheapest closed models at about 1/4 the price.
• Compared with frontier models running every step, open-weight models can cost as little as 1/20.
• Current open models may be more verbose and retry, narrowing savings to five or six times per task.
• By 2030, Gartner forecasts 90% of enterprise operational agent workflow steps will run on open-weight models.