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COMPEL Glossary / per-task-cost

Per-task cost

An agent SLI capturing the full compute and API cost of a single task end-to-end — including all loop iterations, tool calls, memory reads and writes.

What this means in practice

Distinct from per-request cost because agents often span many requests per task; key input to the agentic unit-economics calculation.

Synonyms

agent per-task cost , cost per successful task

See also

  • Unit economics — Cost and revenue per atomic unit — per transaction, per successful decision, per hour saved — for an AI feature.
  • Prompt caching — An inference optimisation that caches the attention key-value state for a prompt prefix so that subsequent requests sharing the same prefix skip re-processing.
  • Goal-achievement rate — An agent service-level indicator measuring the fraction of tasks that reach their intended outcome without human intervention.