The lazy way to build an AI product is to send everything to the most powerful model and pass the bill to the customer. It works, and it’s ruinously expensive.
Most steps are easy
In real workflows, the large majority of steps are routine — classify this, extract that, summarize the other. They don’t need a frontier model; a lightweight one succeeds at a fraction of the cost.
Escalate only when it counts
The Intelligent Router scores every step on complexity, modality, latency, and cost, then routes it. Routine extraction goes to a small model; multi-constraint planning or legal drafting escalates to BabyBuddha-reasoning or a frontier model.
Premium quality, real-world bills
The result is frontier-grade quality on the ten-to-twenty percent of steps that need it, and real bills that land far below a flat “always-premium” price.