AI models come in sizes, like engines. The big ones are genuinely smarter. They are also 10-30x more expensive per token. The entire skill of AI cost control comes down to one question: which jobs actually need the big engine?
Where the small model gives you the same answer
For a surprising share of everyday office work, a light model produces output you cannot tell apart from the premium one:
- Customer replies and support responses
- Summarizing documents, meetings, and threads
- First drafts of routine emails and posts
- Reformatting, rewriting, translating
- Extracting names, dates, and numbers from text
These tasks have clear instructions and a known shape. That is exactly what small models are good at. Benchmarks consistently show that routing this kind of work to lighter models keeps 95%+ of quality while cutting the cost of those tasks by 70-90%.
Where the big model earns its price
Premium models are worth every cent on a much shorter list:
- Complex analysis across long documents
- Work where nuance and judgment carry real risk - legal, medical, financial
- Multi-step reasoning: plans, strategies, tricky debugging
- High-stakes writing where tone must be perfect
The blind test
Not sure where a task falls? Run it through both models and compare the answers without looking at which is which. Most teams doing this for the first time discover that 60-80% of their daily tasks pass on the light model. That share, priced at a 10-30x discount, is where the 30-50% savings comes from.
Doing this automatically
Manually picking a model per task is nobody's job. That is the point of Optimize: it learns which tasks your teams repeat, recommends the cheapest model that handles each one well, and flags the few that genuinely deserve premium. You approve once, and every task after that lands on the right size by default.