EY is carving out an entirely new corporate function: someone whose job is to manage the economics of an AI-powered workforce. The firm published a report titled “Unlocking agentic value: a new investment discipline for the agentic era” on April 17, 2026, laying out the case for why every large enterprise needs a Head of Agent Economics.
What the role actually involves
The Head of Agent Economics, as EY envisions it, would centralize accountability for AI-related expenses across an organization. Not just the per-token cost of running a large language model, but the full stack of financial considerations that come with deploying autonomous AI agents at scale.
EY’s framework identifies seven categories of AI and cloud costs that need coordinated oversight. That includes everything from raw compute and cloud infrastructure to the operational budgeting required to keep AI agents functioning, monitored, and productive.
The core argument is straightforward: companies are spending aggressively on AI agents, but most of them have no single person or team responsible for understanding whether that spending is actually generating returns. AI costs are scattered across IT budgets, cloud contracts, vendor agreements, and department-level experiments. Without centralized visibility, organizations are flying blind on one of their fastest-growing expense categories.
