AI Model Routing Explained: How Smart Routing Picks the Right LLM
Smart LLM routing automatically assigns tasks to the lowest-cost capable model, reducing cost and latency
“Smart routing evaluates each task separately and routes it to the lowest cost model that is capable of doing the job.”
Databricks' Agentic AI Explain series demonstrates smart LLM routing via Omnigant and Poly, which classify task complexity and assign work to the cheapest capable model rather than defaulting to frontier models. The demo shows parallel agent execution across backend and frontend subtasks using different models. This is a practical engineering pattern gaining traction as teams look to reduce inference costs in agentic pipelines.