Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs

"It's going to be an absolute nightmare," says an executive at a big American tech company. He is talking about an emerging problem for businesses that use artificial intelligence.

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AI agents—bots that can read, interpret and act—use masses of processing power and have started to run up huge bills. As they proliferate, the problem will grow. Big companies, the executive points out, typically use hundreds of software programs. If each of those offer agents (as they probably will), AI costs could easily spiral out of control.

Budget management is a new worry for AI adopters. Not long ago employees were encouraged to binge on the technology, as bosses and investors saw spending as a sign of innovation. Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—became a badge of honour. Some techies dubbed it "token-maxxing". Companies showed off staff's AI use on internal leaderboards. Meta's display awarded top users titles like "Token Legend".