“Nine in 10 agent workflow steps are routine, and open-weight models handle them at parity for a quarter of the price of the cheapest closed model,” the firm’s senior director Mark Petty and group vice president Raymond Paquet wrote last week in new document titled “Open-Weight Models Will Run 90% of Enterprise Agentic Workflow Steps.” “Typical operational workflows involve hundreds of routine executions, such as classification, tool calling, passing, validating and reconciling data,” the pair observe, before suggesting open-weight models “can handle hundreds of these routine steps for every one that needs frontier reasoning.” “Against the cheapest closed model at the same score, the open model costs a quarter as much.
Against a frontier model run on every step, it costs as little as a twentieth,” the pair add. Those are the best-case numbers, because the analysts admit “Current open models can be more verbose and retry more often, so the saving per task against a frontier model is closer to five or six times.”
