{"id":550612,"date":"2026-07-30T03:41:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T03:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/550612\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T03:41:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T03:41:11","slug":"atlassian-tightens-tracking-of-staff-ai-use-as-other-technology-firms-encourage-tokenmaxxing-atlassian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/550612\/","title":{"rendered":"Atlassian tightens tracking of staff AI use as other technology firms encourage \u2018tokenmaxxing\u2019 | Atlassian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Software firm Atlassian<\/a> has sought to tighten tracking of its staff\u2019s AI spending by introducing \u201cwallets\u201d with monthly caps of up $2,000 for each employee, amid an explosion in costs at other tech companies.<\/p>\n

The move by Atlassian, which recently cited AI<\/a> as part of the reason behind cutting 1,600 staff, bucks the trend of others in the tech sector who encouraged employees to use as much of the technology as possible, dubbed \u201ctokenmaxxing\u201d. Some companies have reportedly introduced leaderboards for employees who used the most AI in their work.<\/p>\n

Tokens refer to the measurement of a response AI gives to a prompt. OpenAI has said one token is about four characters, and something like the US Declaration of Independence amounts to 1,695 tokens. OpenAI\u2019s flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, has a charge of US$5 for every 1m tokens, while Anthropic\u2019s Claude Fable and Mythos models are US$10 for every 1m tokens.<\/p>\n

Under tokenmaxxing, the costs quickly add up.<\/p>\n

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Uber reportedly blew through its AI budget<\/a> in four months, and Amazon has reportedly told employees to stop using AI just for the sake of using AI.<\/p>\n

While Atlassian never encouraged tokenmaxxing or had unlimited AI budgets, the Australian company this month introduced an \u201cAI wallet\u201d for staff in the research and development team.<\/p>\n

According to an internal memo seen by Guardian Australia, employees have between $500 and $2,000 monthly spend in the wallet, which can be used across four AI products, including Claude Code. Employees receive notifications as they approach their limit on their wallets, and usage is paused when the money runs out.<\/p>\n

Employees can request additional funds. It is understood Atlassian has not turned down any request for additional funds so far.<\/p>\n

A company spokesperson said it was transforming into an \u201cAI-first company\u201d by supporting people building and experimenting with the technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cAtlassian provides a significant budget for our builders to leverage multiple AI tools,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI tooling budgets are set by role based on how different teams work.\u201d<\/p>\n

They said the wallet also represented a boost in the amount employees could spend.<\/p>\n

A June PureProfile survey of 500 senior Australia staff at companies using AI, conducted on behalf of search AI company Elastic, found that 80% were concerned that high usage was being mistaken for productivity gains.<\/p>\n

It found 32% had reported pausing, cancelling or winding back AI deployments, due to cost.<\/p>\n

Elastic\u2019s ANZ manager, Jeremy Pell, said a monthly cap on AI spend was \u201csmart\u201d and more organisations should be doing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, only 9% of Australian organisations currently have any limits on token or API consumption when it comes to AI agents or autonomous workflows, so any organisation that adopts this practice is an outlier,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished vice-president analyst at research firm Gartner, said wallets were a simple way to \u201cincentivise the right behaviour\u201d and stop people from using AI ineffectively.<\/p>\n

He said such expenses were becoming an important issue among businesses, with the cost explosion being driven by AI agents that autonomously undertake tasks on behalf of the user.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou suddenly have these systems that are all trying to do independent tasks that are spawning smaller agents, that are creating their own prompts and initiating requests for the model,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo while the AI model prices have been falling for the last three years, the volume of tokens that particularly the AI agents are starting to send to the models \u2026 is significantly increasing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chandrasekaran said companies are figuring out how to drive the cost down, including using less powerful models for simpler tasks, and looking at using open weight \u2013 where people can download and run the models on their own systems \u2013 or open source models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Software firm Atlassian has sought to tighten tracking of its staff\u2019s AI spending by introducing \u201cwallets\u201d with monthly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-550612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}