Cut AI token usage by 96%? Here’s how AWS Strands Agents does it.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, AWS developer advocate Morgan Willis demonstrates Strands Agents, an open source agentic framework with rapid adoption since its launch. Using a simple accounting API, she walks through three approaches to retrieving a customer’s latest invoice, highlighting how design choices dramatically impact efficiency. The initial method maps each API endpoint to a separate tool, requiring five chained calls and consuming about 52,000 tokens. By shifting to intent-based tools—focused on outcomes rather than individual data operations—the same task is completed in a single call using just 2,000 tokens, improving both efficiency and reasoning.