“Tokenmaxxing,” or the controversial practice of flaunting the number of AI tokens you’ve spent, is gaining popularity outside of Silicon Valley.
Visa, the world’s largest payments company, was spending 1.9 trillion tokens a month as of March, double the number it recorded in February of this year, the company told Business Insider.
Visa says it focuses on real results, not just accomplishments. We now reward teams that demonstrate using AI to get things done faster.
“What matters is the magnitude of the impact,” said Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology.
It’s the latest sign that large companies are aggressively implementing AI within their companies, with JPMorgan tracking how often its employees use AI and IKEA launching AI Sidekick to help employees brainstorm. Companies are now not only tracking AI usage, but also rewarding their employees for it.
Unsurprisingly, Taneja said the biggest use of tokens at Visa is in the software engineering sector. But AI is becoming more prevalent in other fields as well.
For example, Visa’s marketing department used AI to create a new ad that shows skiers racing through the sun-drenched streets of the Amalfi Coast.
Visa’s Internal AI Award
Visa begins recognizing teams that use AI to enhance their operations.
One team received this award for shipping a new API within six days using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model. Teams can choose their own prizes, including internal “points” that can be used toward purchases such as coffee makers, Taneja said.
Taneja said Visa employees use a variety of chatbots, with Claude currently being the most popular, but often replaced by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini is also a popular choice within the company, he noted.
According to Visas, 89% of employees are active AI users and 44% are considered power users. This means on average at least 25 prompts per day for 15 days a month.
How much is 1 trillion tokens?
The 1 trillion token milestone is noteworthy for companies outside of Silicon Valley. However, in AI land, using up that high number has become routine.
According to a recent report in The Information, Meta employees burned through 60 trillion tokens in one month.
One developer at Cognition, an AI coding startup, also posted a photo of the OpenAI certificate he received in recognition of his accomplishments, with annual usage exceeding 1 trillion.
Still, Visa’s token pitch shows that token burning is no longer limited to frontier technology companies.
People working in various industries may want to take note.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime change, bigger than any technology in the past,” Taneja said.