Artificial intelligence agent tool-call latency includes request construction, scheduling, network transit, authentication, service execution, response transfer, parsing, and any retries. An agent may make many sequential calls, so moderate delay per tool can dominate total task time.
Latency can be reduced with parallel independent calls, local execution, caching, fewer round trips, streaming, suitable timeouts, and faster services. Optimization must preserve correctness, permissions, rate limits, and clear handling of partial or timed-out results.
