The engineer's observation about the new solution being less time efficient during inference is most directly applicable when the new solution requires each of the three models to compute a prediction for every record. This approach multiplies the computation needed for inference across the dataset. Even if each model's latency is similar to the original, requiring all models to predict for each record triples the computational work, increasing the total time required to process the same number of records. Options A, C, D, and E do not directly address the scenario's constraints or imply an increase in computational load as described in option B.