From Model Services to Token Services: A New Infrastructure for Intelligent Production in the Agent Era

Artificial intelligence is moving from demonstrations of capability toward the execution of tasks at scale. This shift is changing the basis of industrial competition: whereas the past was largely defined by comparisons of model capability, the future will depend increasingly on whether intelligence can be delivered continuously with stability, low cost, and high quality. This paper proposes TaaS—Token as a service—as an infrastructural paradigm. It examines why Tokens are becoming the basic unit of the intelligent era and discusses three foundational capabilities required for the realization of TaaS: system-wide heterogeneous collaboration, storage-compute coordination—through the substitution of storage for computation, and service level objective (SLO)-oriented intelligent scheduling.