The Harness Margin Opportunity
The better the harness, the better the business. Berkeley published a study this week showing harnesses, the systems that control AI agents, set the price of an answer. The right harness cuts the cost of the same result by 71% without a loss of accuracy. 1 The data points to the opportunity for the next generation software applications : harnesses. Yes, we can use AI to do almost anything we want at work. But no, we cannot afford to provide everyone access to state of the art models for every task. Harnesses coalesce common workflows into repeatable patterns : deterministic code or skills. The better the harness, the greater the compression, the lower the AI cost. Imagine Theory buys a $250k a year contract for an AI associate to evaluate 5,000 companies. Two startups bid. Inferno calls a state of the art model on every step. Inferefficient runs a harness that coalesces the work into deterministic code, reserving the expensive model for the few steps that need it. Inferno burns $1
