Agentpower

The unit of cognitive work output for the AI age.

In 1782, James Watt needed to sell steam engines to brewery owners. The brewers didn't understand pressure differentials or thermal efficiency. They understood horses. So Watt invented a word: horsepower. One engine, he told them, produces the equivalent of twenty horses.

The brewers bought the engines.

Two hundred and forty-four years later, AI tokens are transforming knowledge work the way coal transformed physical work. But we're still measuring the wrong thing. Token consumption tells you how much fuel was burned — not how much work was done. That's like measuring a factory by its coal bill.

Agentpower measures what matters: the total cognitive output of a human-AI system, benchmarked against what one unaided human produces.

The AP Ratio

The AP Ratio measures the average amplification factor across a team, department, or organisation:

An AP ratio of 1.0 is the world before 2023. Klarna runs at roughly 3.5. Meta's CTO recently said his most productive engineer produces roughly ten times normal output while spending the equivalent of his salary on tokens — a personal AP ratio of 10.

The Production Function Shift

More heads, more output — that was the old formula. Proportionally, predictably, linearly. It shaped how organisations were structured, how companies were valued, how entire economies were planned.

That formula is breaking.

Where Labour is human headcount and Fuel is AI token expenditure directed by human judgement. The relationship is multiplicative, not additive. Tokens without human direction produce noise. Humans without tokens produce at baseline. The product of the two is where the amplification happens.

The Economics

In the old world, one agentpower costs what one employee costs. The median EU knowledge worker costs roughly €62,000 per year all-in (salary plus employer contributions).

In the new world, additional agentpower comes from tokens — at a fraction of that cost.

The first AP still costs a salary — you need the human operator. Each additional AP above that costs only token fuel. Even at frontier model pricing, the new model is ~80% cheaper than five salaries.

This is the structural economic shift. Not an incremental improvement.

Real-World Reference Points

| Organisation | Change | Implied AP Ratio | |---|---|---| | Klarna (2022→2026) | −49% headcount, +104% revenue | ~3.5 | | AI-native SaaS (2025) | €0.9M–€3.7M revenue per employee | 4.0–8.0 | | Meta top engineer (2026) | ~10× normal output (per CTO) | ~10.0 | | Pre-AI knowledge work baseline | — | 1.0 |

Calculate Your AP Ratio

Why "Agent"?

The word agent holds two meanings that map precisely onto this transition:

• Old meaning: A person who acts on behalf of another — the lawyer, the broker, the consultant, the administrator
• New meaning: An AI system that acts autonomously to complete tasks

Agentpower measures what the two produce together. The human is the operator. The AI is the engine. Without the human's judgement, direction, and context, the engine produces noise. Without the engine, the human is limited to 1 AP.

The power is in the pairing.

The word comes from Latin agere: to act. It translates naturally across languages. No trademark is claimed. The goal is universal adoption.

Scope and Limitations

Agentpower applies to cognitive work — any professional activity where the primary output is produced by thinking, analysing, writing, communicating, calculating, diagnosing, designing, advising, or deciding.

What it does not measure:

• ·Token consumption (input metric, not output metric)
• ·Revenue per employee (conflates pricing, market conditions, and productivity)
• ·Hours worked (measures time, not output)

Honest limitations:

Cognitive output is hard to measure. Unlike horsepower, which maps to a precise physical quantity, cognitive output varies by profession and context. The AP framework is directional, not exact.

Not all tasks amplify equally. Routine, structured tasks amplify more readily than novel, creative, or interpersonal tasks. Quality matters — 5 AP of mediocre output is not 5 AP.

Token costs are falling. The economics described here reflect 2026 pricing. As costs continue to decline, the marginal cost of additional AP will decrease further.

Frequently Asked Questions

Origin and License

The concept was introduced in the essay Horsepower Then, Agentpower Now published in Pale Blue Dot on Medium in April 2026. The full definition, methodology, and EUR/AP pricing derivation are available on GitHub under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The term agentpower and the AP ratio framework are released into the public domain for universal use. No trademark is claimed. The goal is adoption, not ownership.

The engine doesn't have a moral compass. The operator does.