This.
As I wrote this, I saw X go into meltdown over tokens.
You've seen the headlines: “Uber blows yearly AI budget in just one quarter.” “Meta employee burns 281 billion tokens in April.”
But, the problem isn't spending. Spending works. Since 2023, the top quartile of our AI spenders doubled their revenue. The bottom quartile? Flat.
It's blind spending. We don’t know which spend worked.
A sales team has qualified leads. A support team has resolved conversations. These are units you can measure against. All a token tells you is the meter ran, not whether the work was worth it or not.
Finance says, “half the budget,” engineering says, “double it” and you don’t know who’s right because there is no shared language of value. There’s no attribution, and no attribution means no allocation.
For example, right now, all work, no matter the size or shape, defaults to frontier models. But meeting summaries and calendar updates don’t require GPT-5.5 Pro.
In isolation this seems trivial, but re-route just 10% of a $10M AI bill from frontier to GPT-4 level intelligence you’ve saved nearly one million dollars. This sounds like a made-up stat — it’s not. It truly is that much cheaper.
This is the future of finance: not blindly rubber-stamping or rejecting AI spend, but allocating it with the same rigor companies apply to headcount.
