AT&T reports up to 56% lower costs from model routing

AT&T reported cost reductions of up to 56% on coding and some other tasks using LiteLLM routers, alongside a reported 2% decline in quality. PYMNTS relayed the figures from The Information’s interview with executive Mark Austin.

The company aims to increase open-model usage while keeping spending on leading proprietary providers flat. Routing lets it reserve expensive models for work that needs them.

The reported trade-off is specific to AT&T’s workloads and quality measure. Another deployment would need to include escalations and rework in its costs, and check whether errors cluster in tasks too important to tolerate the average decline.