Dialogue with PPIO Yao Xin: Token’s first customer is no longer people, but Agents

Smart Things Author | Wang Han Editor | Mo Ying At the beginning of 2026, the "crayfish" OpenClaw was born and became popular. With its capabilities of independent planning, multi-step reasoning and tool invocation, this open source AI agent has allowed countless developers and geeks to truly feel the shock of "AI can work on its own" for the first time. Immediately afterwards, various types of customized personal intelligence have flourished, and the global AI intelligence market is expected to grow from US$5.1 billion in 2024 to US$47.1 billion in 2030. Every multi-step reasoning and every long-range task of the Agent requires the supply of tens of thousands of Tokens. As a unit of measurement in the intelligent era, Token’s production, optimization and scheduling have been thrust into the spotlight. People began to ask: Where did Token come from? How to make Token more stable and high-quality? In an in-depth conversation between Zhixixi and PPIO co-founder and CEO Yao Xin, Yao Xin refined this year’s changes into “Tokens will be smarter” and “the cloud will be redefined: from tokens for people to tokens for agents.” When token customers are no longer people, but agents, cloud service providers no longer need just CPU, hard disk, and bandwidth, but a "Token factory" for Agent workloads, a way of operating with lower latency, higher throughput, and better understanding of Agents. It is at this industry turning point that PPIO officially released the new Agentic Cloud positioning and the new Intelligent Model Gateway product at the WAIC 2026 conference, committed to creating an intelligent Token factory for the Agent era. Around this positioning, PPIO Agentic Cloud has built a two-layer native product system: intelligent model gateway and Agent Harness layer. 1. Two key words of the smart Token factory: making the Agent save money and become smarter. According to Chishi Consulting, although the cost of reasoning is declining at a rate of more than 10 times every year, the complexity of Agent tasks is rising simultaneously. A single Agent