Token leaderboards are not a great idea.

Now we're hearing about budget freezes and per-employee token limits.

Both are the same mistake.

Treating AI as one number on the budget is like treating all your salary spend as one number. Nobody does that. A staff engineer and a contractor aren't the same line, and you'd never set one headcount budget and call it strategy.

But that's exactly how most teams are handling AI right now. One bucket. One number to either brag about or panic over.

The value AI adds to shipping a feature that moves your top line is nothing like the value it adds writing cold email copy — or the value it adds when you're burning tokens recreating a tool you could have bought.

Lumping all of that together as "AI spend" is how you end up making bad decisions in both directions: tokenmaxxing to inflate the number, then slamming on the brakes when the bill scares you.

We've watched this play out. We've talked to teams blocked from spending on a tool that would solve a real problem for 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the salaries they're already paying to solve it by hand — because the "AI budget" was frozen.

The worst part is what the freeze kills: experimentation. When you cut that, you're betting the technology around you isn't changing. It is.

AI isn't a line item. It's a set of very different bets, each tied to a different part of your business. Start budgeting it that way: https://open.substack.com/pub/frontierai/p/ai-is-not-a-line-item?r=c2wbd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web