Module 2 · Lab 2 · 20 min
💬 Customer Support Cost Optimizer
Optimize a 3-agent AI customer-support system: 5,000 tickets/month, 3 sequential Claude agents, $5,000/month baseline. Your job — optimize without dropping below 85% resolution.
Page 1 · Your Scenario
Current architecture
Current baseline
Monthly Cost
$5,000
Per Ticket
$1.00
Response Time
90 sec
Resolution
87%
Cost breakdown
Agent 1 (Triage)$1,400 (28%)
Agent 2 (Analysis)$2,100 (42%)
Agent 3 (Resolution)$1,500 (30%)
Total Monthly$5,000
💡 Context: your CFO says AI support costs are 2% of revenue. Your job: optimize without dropping below 85% resolution rate.
Page 2 · Exercise 1: Understand the Baseline
Goal: analyze where money goes. No changes yet.
Question 1 · Which agent costs most?
Answer: Agent 2 (Analysis) at $2,100/month = 42% of budget. Why? It has the longest context (ticket + category + history + similar cases) — more context means more input tokens, and Opus input is $15/1M tokens.
Question 2 · What's your cost per ticket?
Answer: $1.00/ticket (5,000 tickets / $5,000). Tokens per ticket: 2,100 total (1,700 in + 400 out).
Question 3 · What if you switch Agent 2 to Sonnet?
Current (Opus)
Agent 2 Cost$2,100
Quality95%
Resolution87%
If Sonnet ($3/1M)
Agent 2 Cost$420
Quality90%
Resolution85%
Savings
-$1,680/mo
💡 Key insight: you could save $1,680/month by switching to Sonnet, but you'd lose 2% resolution rate. That's the tradeoff.
Page 3 · Exercise 2: Optimization Levers
Challenge: reduce costs 30% without dropping below 85% resolution.
Real-time results
New Cost
$5,000
Savings
-$0
Resolution
87%
Status
✅ Target Met!
Before → After
Cost$5,000 → $5,000
Per ticket$1.00 → $1.00
Resolution87% → 87%
💡 Hint: try Haiku for Triage (simple categorization) + Sonnet for Analysis & Resolution to hit 30% savings.
Page 4 · Exercise 3: Scaling Challenge
Challenge: your optimized system scales to 50K tickets/month (10x growth). What changes?
At 5K/mo
$3,500
At 50K/mo
$35,000
New Problems
Quotas, SLA, Infra
Choose your scale strategy
👆 Click a strategy above to see the impact…
💡 Reality check: scaling 10x isn't just multiplying by 10 — you hit API quotas, need infrastructure changes, and operational complexity increases. Your architecture needs to adapt.
Page 5 · Exercise 4: Design Your Optimal System
Challenge: design from scratch. Budget: $6K/month. Min resolution: 85%. Volume: 5K–50K tickets/month, your choice.
Your design costs
Est. Cost
$10,500
Est. Quality
90%
Budget
❌ Over
Design vs. constraints
Budget limit$6,000
Your cost$10,500
Min resolution85%
Your est.90%
Status
❌ Over Budget
✅ Congrats! You've completed Lab 2. You now understand cost drivers, optimization levers, scaling challenges, and cost/quality tradeoffs.