AI Employees Need Cheaper API Fuel Every AI employee you deploy costs money every time it thinks. That sentence sounds obvious when you write it out. But watch how fast costs compound when you actually try to run an AI-powered workforce. One agent handling customer tickets might make 50 API calls per conversation. A research agent synthesizing market data could burn through $20 in credits before lunch. Scale to 100 agents, and you're not running a business—you're funding an OpenAI subsidiary. This is the dirty secret of the AI employee revolution: the workers are free. The fuel isn't. The Rise of the AI Workforce The open-source community has noticed. Projects like OpenLabor and AgencyAgents have made it remarkably easy to deploy AI employees that can reason, delegate, and execute workflows autonomously. These aren't simple chatbots.…