Smart AI Routing: When Frontier Models Are Overkill

Not all queries deserve expensive frontier models like GPT-4o—yet most companies default to routing everything through premium AI at massive cost. This article demonstrates a pragmatic three-tier system: rules engines for deterministic queries, Claude Haiku for simple generation, and GPT-4o exclusively for complex reasoning. By implementing this selective routing, one team cut their monthly bill from $7,200 to $2,000 while handling 22% of queries without any LLM involvement, proving that intelligent model matching outperforms one-size-fits-all AI deployment.