Agentic AI systems offer significant potential in enterprise innovation, but hidden costs can present challenges when scaling.The complexity and hidden traps in building and scaling agentic AI systems lead to high costs.Simple single-agent use cases can lead to challenges such as increased API usage, infrastructure complexity, and latency issues.Scaling to multi-agent architectures can exponentially increase costs due to added complexity and orchestration requirements.Agentic AI costs are distributed across various components and decisions within the system.Hidden cost traps include manual iteration without cost awareness, overprovisioned infrastructure, and rigid architectures.To combat hidden costs, organizations should embed cost-awareness throughout the lifecycle of agentic AI systems.Optimizing system components during development helps in finding the right balance between cost, accuracy, and latency.Infrastructure-aware orchestration and dynamic workload management can help in efficiently utilizing resources.Using AI gateways can provide flexibility for system updates, policy enforcement, and compliance without major architectural changes.