There was a time when token costs felt like rounding errors. A prototype making a few hundred calls a day, with a few cents here and there. That changes fast. When a generative AI (GenAI) application scales to thousands of users making multiple requests daily, token costs stop being a footnote and start being a line item that competes with infrastructure. The question is not whether to manage token consumption. It is whether you do so deliberately or by accident.
This article organizes some of the methods for reducing token consumption in production GenAI and agentic AI applications. Though not an exhaustive list, it is an actionable set of principles to apply directly and generative enough to spark further ideas. After all, frugality is the mother of invention, and in the age of AI transformation, thinking carefully about where tokens go is not an optimization. It is a discipline.