The AI bill is coming due. Businesses are learning tokens aren’t free

FOMO is strong around AI, with companies adopting the technology willy-nilly. Many have encouraged employees to tokenmaxx to their hearts’ content. Now they’re starting to realize that freedom comes with a price. Just one in four companies say they have a comprehensive view of what artificial intelligence is costing them, according to an as-yet-unreleased KPMG survey reported by The Wall Street Journal. Only about half have even some visibility into the cost of their AI use. One in five have no visibility, or only see the damage once the bill arrives. “It’s a new resource that needs to be managed that didn’t exist quite that way, and we’re seeing exponential growth,” Steve Chase, KPMG’s global head of AI, told the Journal. Part of the problem is pinning down what, exactly, AI costs. The basic unit of AI use—the token—is an unusual thing to budget around. Each token is a fragment of text, code, or data processed by a model when it reads a prompt or produces an answer, but it doesn’t map neatly onto a single word. Some tokens can be cached by AI models, meaning they are not charged again, while others must be processed as new. The result is uncertainty that may not become clear until the bill lands at the end of the month. Multiply that across individual employees at a company, and it is little wonder that chief financial officers are being left with eye-watering bills. KPMG is working with companies that have blown through annual token and cloud-computing budgets in a matter of months, Chase told the Journal, while one client has seen token usage rise sixfold. Axios reported last month that one AI consultant’s client spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on employees’ Claude licenses. “People are getting these massive bills,” says Sam Ransbotham, professor of analytics at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. “They turn on usage, and suddenly the people paying the bill are not the people using the product, and whene