A new word is keeping bosses up at night across the tech world: tokenomics. It refers to the challenge of managing the rapidly climbing cost of using AI. Tokens are essentially a measure of how much content an AI model analyzes and generates. As companies collectively pour hundreds of millions of dollars into AI tools for coding, marketing, and customer service, this cost has turned into one of the most heated debates in the boardroom.
How One Company Saved $5 Million
The cloud communications firm 8x8 is a telling example. The company estimates that over the past 18 months it has saved roughly $5 million in annual costs by canceling subscriptions to dozens of software and educational tools it considered unnecessary. A big reason was that Claude could provide similar capabilities.
According to Joel Neeb, the company's chief transformation and business operations officer, 8x8's annualized bill for Claude is still "well below" that savings figure. Neeb expects the savings and costs to eventually even out as the company pushes more employees to adopt AI and folds the technology into more complicated work. For now, though, there is a huge gap, which "makes my chief financial officer happy," he told TrendKia. He declined to share the exact total spending on generative AI.
Token Use Turns 'Pretty Crazy'
This anxiety is hardly unique to 8x8. Last month, the CEO of Royal Bank of Canada disclosed that the bank's token usage had surged 500 percent over the past six months. At Cisco, a third of employees use an internal AI chatbot daily, prompting CEO Chuck Robbins to say on an earnings call that "the token usage is getting pretty, pretty crazy."
At the analytics software developer Amplitude, some top engineers are "spending thousands of dollars a month or more on tokens," according to CEO Spenser Skates. Aaron Levine, the CEO of Box, said, "The token budgeting conversation has absolutely taken over as one of the most important" and "heated" topics.
A TrendKia review of transcripts from the data provider AlphaStreet found that roughly 300 companies addressed questions or concerns about AI tokens during their earnings calls or in public discussions with financial analysts in April or May. That is a small fraction of the thousands of calls held during that span, but just 93 companies mentioned "token" in April and May a year ago.
Hunting for Systems to Rein In Costs
Executives at several companies said they are building or looking to buy systems that can monitor token usage and pick the lowest-priced model for a given prompt. Others said they are still trying to figure out how to balance hiring more people against increasing their budgets for tokens to hit their goals.
Software has rarely come cheap, but the latest generation of AI tools is causing unusual stress in the C-suite for several reasons. Prices keep fluctuating. New models that are more powerful, and more expensive, than the last get released every month. And getting an entire organization to embrace new ways of working is its own challenge, so AI-fueled productivity gains on one team can turn into bottlenecks for another.
The Companies That Spend Without Flinching
Even so, some companies are encouraging employees to use AI more without fretting over the tab. In April, the Long Island, New York-based clothing brand Baseball Lifestyle 101, which expects to generate $250 million in sales this year, told about 50 of its top managers to spend the equivalent of about 20 percent of their salary on AI tokens every month.
Bill Rom, the cofounder and chief strategy officer of Baseball Lifestyle 101, told TrendKia that the cost is likely to exceed $100,000 a month by the end of the year, but it is already paying off. Claude recently helped land a $1 million order by spotting that a retailer was running low on certain sizes of the company's popular ice-cream-patterned shorts. "That's a day and a half of work that can now happen in an hour or two that might make me eight figures of additional revenue over 12 months," Rom says.
The AI chatbot also helps write financial reports and plan photoshoots, letting the company hire fewer junior staffers and direct investments elsewhere. Rom says it is important to "inspire people how to use AI" before setting financial ground rules on the technology.
8x8's Dashboard and the Possibility of Caps
At 8x8, which builds a communications platform to help manage sales and customer service, all of the roughly 1,800 full-time employees are urged to regularly check a dashboard that shows how much they and their colleagues are using Claude, in the spirit of not leaving anyone behind. "It's not punitive in the least; it's really just so that we all stay tightly packed in this journey," Neeb says. In May, the product and customer success teams were among the heaviest users, while the sales and finance teams were among the lightest.
Neeb says it is possible that 8x8 will introduce caps on how much staff can use Claude. He floated the idea for the first time recently with the CFO because of growing internal use of the Claude Opus 4.8 model, which was released last month and costs nearly 1.7 times more than an offering Anthropic released in February. No decisions have been made, but going forward, access to Opus might require proving that older models cannot get the job done, Neeb says. "Can we downgrade the model a little bit and still get the same outcome?"
Otherwise, Neeb insists 8x8 is not pulling back from generative AI in any way. Measures of customer satisfaction and loyalty have been trending higher, and revenue has grown for four consecutive quarters as AI-generated analyses speed up the work of its sales staff. Attributing those trends to AI alone, or even to AI at all, is difficult, but Neeb suspects a connection. "It really is the rising tide that floats all boats when you do this right," he says.
A Warning for Those Who Won't Learn AI
About two years ago, 8x8 first waded into generative AI by giving all of its employees training and support for OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Later, a select few were offered Claude, Neeb says, and over the past year it became the companywide standard.
Management monitors usage and has warned employees that refusing to gain AI fluency will carry consequences. "If you're not using AI in some capacity for your role, then you're missing the opportunity to go faster and get better answers more effectively than your peers," Neeb says.
Other tech employers have issued similar directives with mixed results. At companies like Amazon and Meta, workers have reported either folding AI into their work simply because they feel they have to, or slacking off because AI tools free up their time, both of which critics describe as waste. Neeb argues that patience and accountability measures are needed to steer employees in the right direction. He does not want them taking longer lunches or sitting on the beach as AI speeds up their work.
Pushing the Laggards to Catch Up
Neeb has also wanted more from what he calls the "laggards in this journey," such as the sales and finance teams. Together they make up 28 percent of the company's employees but account for just 15 percent of token consumption. He is hoping that a recent AI hackathon for the finance team spurs it to automate its many manual processes, such as collecting money from customers and generating quarterly accounting.
The operations leader says he has seen firsthand how efficient Claude can make his company. Neeb uses the tool to automate a daily email to the company that summarizes the best AI usage tips from industry influencers on YouTube. After noticing that the task ate up "a lot of tokens," Neeb says he asked Claude whether it could run more affordably. Claude reworked the automation and cut token usage by 80 percent.
