AI costs surge, but benefits fall short for companies

Big tech companies like Microsoft and Uber are rethinking their AI spending. Goldman Sachs says token use could jump 24 times by 2030, hitting 120 quadrillion tokens monthly. AI agents can use over 1,000 times more tokens than a single chatbot.

An OpenAI employee shared that a 3-person team spent over 1.3 million dollars on tokens in one month. Uber's CTO said they burned through their 2026 AI budget in just a few months, without delivering useful features for users. Uber's operations chief noted more token use didn't mean better customer features.

Microsoft has started cutting costs too. They removed employee access to Claude Code subscriptions and switched to their own Copilot CLI. They also changed GitHub Copilot to token-based billing. These moves come near the end of their fiscal year, hinting at budget tightening.