Corporate America Cuts AI Spending After Burning Millions on Tokens

3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Aug 3

Companies that once pushed “tokenmaxxing” are now reining in AI use after spending millions of dollars on the computing units that power many AI tools.
Those pullbacks reflect a basic problem: executives still struggle to measure what AI is good for, what they are actually buying, and whether the spending will generate a return.
Howard Rubin, a technology-spending adviser, said AI is being treated as an investment even though companies lack clear accounting practices and intuitive benchmarks for token consumption.
That uncertainty has spawned a new “tokenomics” field focused on how AI computing is priced, traded and converted into business value.
Unlike earlier technology shifts such as cloud computing, AI’s potential may be profound, but its costs and benefits remain harder for companies to weigh.