Back to Articles a]:hidden"> Model Routing Is Simple. Until It Isn’t. Enterprise Article Published July 15, 2026 Upvote 12 +6 Yara Rizk yarizk Follow ibm-research Eyal Shnarch eishna Follow ibm-research Jason Tsay jsntsay Follow ibm-research Merve Unuvar mrvnvr Follow ibm-research 1. Cost Is More Than Model Pricing 2. Complexity Is More Than Task Difficulty 3. Latency Is More Than Model Speed So How Did We Handle This?
The Bigger Picture Acknowledgement Building a router into your agent sounds like an easy win. Send simple requests to cheaper models, reserve expensive ones for harder tasks, or route by specialty — Claude for code, Gemini for multimodal, and so on. A classifier or heuristic makes the call, costs go down, performance stays up. Done.
Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/ibm-research/model-routing-is-simple-until-it-isnt
The Bigger Picture Acknowledgement Building a router into your agent sounds like an easy win. Send simple requests to cheaper models, reserve expensive ones for harder tasks, or route by specialty — Claude for code, Gemini for multimodal, and so on. A classifier or heuristic makes the call, costs go down, performance stays up. Done.
Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/ibm-research/model-routing-is-simple-until-it-isnt