The tokenpocalypse is upon us, and it’s coming for nontechnical staff. Many large companies have pushed employees to use AI for nearly everything, partly to justify the enormous sums they poured into the technology without any clear integration strategy. But a new report from 404 Media shows that some of those same firms are now tightening access after discovering that employees are burning tokens on tasks that never required AI in the first place.
The publication reportedly obtained audio of a meeting at consulting giant Accenture, where staffers have been told they’re seeing “soaring token spend” driven by pointless tasks like converting PDFs into presentation slides. Those uses are actually starting to burn more tokens than the work being done by technical staff. “We’re seeing from some of the data internally, at least, that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption,” an Accenture employee said in the audio, per 404 Media. “It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors.”
While it may seem a bit absurd to think that workers who focus on BS-ing their way through presentations would be using more tokens than their colleagues over in engineering, PDFs are an extraordinarily inefficient way to feed information into AI systems. Depending on the tool and the document, a model may have to extract and interpret not just the text but also every page’s layout, images, charts, and other visual elements. The file format may be a boss’s best friend, but that could change once the token bills start piling up.
It’s not exactly hard to figure out how Accenture found itself in this situation. According to a report published by the Financial Times earlier this year, the Fortune 500 consulting company went out of its way to push people to use AI tools, going so far as to track logins made by staff and tying promotions to their chatbot usage. In a memo to the staff, the company reportedly said that moving up in the company would require “regular adoption” of AI, signaling that using the technology would not be optional.
Accenture, of course, is far from the only company to use some shockingly uncritical metrics to push AI usage. Big Tech firms like Meta and Amazon started leaderboards to track which employees in the company were burning through the most tokens and incentivizing them to push themselves onto the list. This, of course, just leads to people doing menial tasks with AI that they could otherwise do themselves, just for the sake of burning tokens.
That approach is dumb but fine in the “free money” era of AI, where costs weren’t linked to token usage. But as the major AI labs head toward IPOs, they’ve shifted to a usage-based model for pricing. The result has been some absurdly high bills. That is less sustainable, and now the companies are starting to ask their employees to cut back on AI usage instead of ramping it up.
Weird how a company that tells other businesses how to operate more efficiently and effectively failed to see the very obvious and predictable token crash coming. Probably nothing to read into there.
