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This paper introduces a framework for optimizing token usage and managing context windows in multi-agent AI workflows, addressing limitations in model quality, latency, and token costs. By implementing six distinct strategies, including context stratification and semantic caching, the authors achieved a significant reduction in cold-load latency from approximately 3.5-10.5 minutes to just 61-116 seconds, alongside a 60-70% decrease in token usage. Additionally, a controlled study demonstrated that replacing high-relevance items with low-relevance counterparts improved relevance-score concordance, highlighting the effectiveness of relevance-contrast context in enhancing model performance.
Cold-load latency slashed by up to 90% while achieving a surprising boost in relevance accuracy through innovative token management strategies.
Multi-agent AI workflows are limited not only by model quality but by token cost, latency, and context-window quality. This paper presents a practitioner framework for token optimization and context-window management, grounded in an internal production dashboard that extracts structured work items from meetings, email, and chat with LLMs and routes summaries across workstreams. Six patterns are described: context stratification, fetch-once/process-locally architecture, schema-contracted prompts, token-aware fallback chains, semantic caching, and inter-agent communication compression. In production they cut measured cold-load latency to 61-116 seconds (six timed runs) from an operational baseline of roughly 3.5-10.5 minutes, with an estimated 60-70% token reduction. It also reports a controlled context-composition study: 2,420 confirmatory trials across 11 model configurations, using 661 anonymized workplace items scored for relevance. Holding the prompt at a fixed ten items, replacing some high-relevance items with same-domain low-relevance items improves the model's relevance-score concordance on the target items, versus high-relevance items only; we call this relevance-contrast context. In the all-11 paired analysis, the 50:50 signal/noise condition improved relevance accuracy by +0.077 over the 100% condition (naive 95% CI [+0.056, +0.098], Cohen's d = 0.49, Holm-adjusted p<.001, n = 220). These cells are not independent; by the nine model families the effect is +0.084 (95% interval [+0.064, +0.103]), reported as a within-corpus descriptive comparison, not a population inference. A Fusion-of-N follow-up found that learned synthesis did not beat the mechanical set union of item IDs. The contribution is a measured engineering layer between model research and production agent practice: repeatable patterns and evaluation methods for faster, cheaper, more reliable workflows.
