Significantly less than you expect — and the number keeps dropping. Orion™ Runtime automatically routes each query to the cheapest model that meets your quality threshold, cutting inference costs up to 50–80% compared to using a single premium model for everything. The key insight is that most enterprise queries do not require the most capable — and most expensive — model available. Routing intelligently across a fleet of models captures most of the quality at a fraction of the cost.
The second driver of cost reduction is local deployment. Orion runs small specialized models on commodity hardware — PCs, servers, and edge devices — eliminating cloud API fees entirely for many workloads. Models in the 1–7 billion parameter range handle a large share of enterprise tasks at a fraction of frontier model cost while keeping data on your own infrastructure. And as AI model costs drop industry-wide — roughly up to 10x per year in recent years — Orion automatically routes to cheaper options as they become available without requiring configuration changes.
- Intelligent routing — Orion Runtime selects the cheapest model that meets your quality threshold for each query, reducing inference costs up to 50–80%
- Local model deployment — small specialized models on your own hardware eliminate cloud API costs for high-volume, lower-complexity workloads
- Automatic cost optimization — as model costs drop, Orion routes to cheaper options without manual reconfiguration
- No data lake prerequisite — AI retrieves data from existing sources on demand; no central warehouse migration required before deployment begins
- Transparent cost tracking — full audit logs of every query and model used provide visibility into AI spend across your fleet