thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Pega’s fix for runaway AI costs: stop the agents from thinking at runtime

Pega’s fix for runaway AI costs: stop the agents from thinking at runtime

by | Jun 13, 2026 | Analysis, Blog |

The news At its PegaWorld conference in Las Vegas on June 8, 2026, Pegasystems announced Pega Infinity 26, which it says will be available in Q3 2026. The principal change is commercial: Pega is moving away from per-token pricing for its AI agents toward a flat charge per completed “case,” which it defines as a task carried out from start to finish, such as a customer changing an order, a loan approval, or a claim. Pega frames the move as removing what it calls the “AI token tax“. The pricing change rests on an architecture Pega calls Predictable AI. Reasoning-heavy AI work is concentrated at design time, when workflows are authored in Pega Blueprint and the new Infinity Studio. At runtime, a lighter-weight model identifies the user’s intent, selects a pre-approved workflow, and executes it step by step; where an individual step requires a language model, for example to parse a document or summarize a prior interaction, that step is given bounded instructions rather than open-ended latitude. Pega gives two reasons: more consistent outcomes, because agents follow approved workflows rather than re-reasoning each request, and more predictable cost, because the heavier processing happens only once during design rather than on every transaction. The architecture is not new to this release. Pega introduced Predictable AI Agents in May 2025 and integrated them into Pega Infinity ’25, which reached general availability in December 2025. Infinity 26 primarily adds the outcomes-based pricing model, alongside a companion announcement that exposes Pega processes as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, allowing third-party agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and AWS to call them under Pega’s governance...