Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies\u2019 AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing \u201csoaring token spend,\u201d according to the audio.<\/p>\n
The news highlights a major shift in the tech industry and other companies that use AI: the wave of uninhibited AI growth is over. Some AI providers like GitHub are now charging customers per token<\/a> rather than a flat subscription fee, leading some companies to burn through their tokens. Uber recently capped employees\u2019 use of AI tools<\/a> like Claude Code and Cursor; that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber\u2019s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget<\/a> in four months. And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI<\/a> or risk losing out on promotions.\u00a0<\/p>\n It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks.<\/p>\n \ud83d\udca1<\/p>\n Do you know anything else about token spend inside tech companies? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it\u2019s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It\u2019s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors […] you were talking about,\u201d Justice Kwak, Accenture\u2019s agentic AI strategy lead, said in a recent internal meeting, according to the audio obtained by 404 Media.<\/p>\n This post is for paid members only<\/p>\n Become a paid member for unlimited ad-free access to articles, bonus podcast content, and more.<\/p>\n