Match Group currently has an AI budget allocated to every employee.
The parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps recently started giving department heads a set amount of money to spend on AI, which they then distributed across their teams. Employees can track their usage on a dashboard and must explain why they want to go over budget. The company’s most expensive AI models are also not available by default and require specific use cases.
“If you don’t put guardrails in place, there’s no reason why engineers shouldn’t use the most expensive model,” said Steve Bailey, Match Group’s chief financial officer. He said the average software engineer at his company spends about $600 a month on AI tokens.
Match Group’s system reflects a growing reality across corporate America. As companies spend billions of dollars on AI, CFOs have emerged as one of the most powerful executives in the AI era.
Finance executives don’t just approve AI budgets; They often decide who has access to AI tools, how much employees can spend, which vendors benefit, and whether investments in AI are creating enough value to justify the cost.
“CFOs are really becoming the face of the AI story,” said Peter Pollini, advisor to finance executives in PwC’s financial services division.
consumption boom
The stakes are huge. Match Group originally allocated $5 million to AI this year and now plans to spend double that, Bailey said. The increase followed CEO Spencer Rascoff’s efforts in May to make the company more AI-native by expanding access to AI tools across the workforce. Initially, it was primarily aimed at engineers.
“We’ve never had to budget for costs this large at the employee level, except maybe for travel and entertainment,” Bailey said.
To fund these investments, Bailey said Match Group plans to significantly slow hiring while it evaluates how AI will reshape its workforce.
Across corporate America, similar calculations have made CFOs the gatekeepers of one of the biggest spending booms in decades.
At Elevance Health, CFO Mark Kaye oversees hidden ways to prevent AI costs from skyrocketing. The insurance giant silently routes employee queries to different AI models based on the complexity of the request. That’s because a single prompt can cost anywhere from a few pennies to more than a dollar, depending on how many tokens, or units of data, an employee swallows.
“We manage it on the back end,” Kaye said, adding that Elevance Health, the parent company of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, expects to invest more than $1 billion in AI this year.
Make AI successful
Some CFOs are making tough decisions about how to fund overall AI-related expenses, such as freezing annual raises or laying off employees. Some say AI is helping them cover their costs.
Kaye said Elevance’s AI automation has reduced the administrative work associated with chart reviews by about 40%, freeing up staff to spend more time supporting customers.
“There are significant inefficiencies in the system, and AI allows us to remove them,” he said.
Tightly reining in AI spending isn’t the only new hurdle for CFOs. They are also responsible for managing spending in categories that are evolving more rapidly than previous generations of enterprise software.
Xero, a global small business platform that provides accounting, payroll and payments, added a budget line item for AI token spending per employee for the first time this year, according to CFO Clare Brumley. The company also created a task force to review software purchases and identify AI products it can do without.
“Are there multiple tools that serve the same purpose?” Brumley said. “As a CFO, you want to make sure that everyone doesn’t get out of control and do their own thing.”
AI is also changing who CFOs spend their time with. Brumley said Xero’s finance, technology and human resources leaders are now collaborating more frequently to evaluate software purchases, hiring plans and how AI will impact future staffing needs.
“Before, you could probably do it once a month, but today I think you need to do it every week,” she said.
additional headache
CFOs also face new business challenges arising from AI.
Netta Samroengraja, head of finance at healthcare platform Zocdoc, said her team had to scramble to evaluate AI tool providers to ironically solve the problems posed by the technology. For example, in the field of recruitment, this technology has made it possible for job seekers to suddenly flood companies with applications and create fake personas.
“The infection spread quickly, so we had to react quickly,” Samroengraja said.
That wasn’t the only surprise, as the economics of AI were also changing. Zocdoc vetted vendors early on, anticipating that prices designed to attract customers in the early days of the AI boom would rise over time.
Samroengraja said the company used that period to test multiple providers and compare cost and effectiveness before settling on the tool that delivered the best business outcomes, adding that Zocdoc is willing to spend more on tools that produce measurable business results, rather than optimizing to minimize AI spend.
“If you can see the ROI, you should keep investing,” she says.
The crowded AI market makes these decisions even more difficult. “New providers are constantly touting tools that promise to increase productivity, reduce costs, or replace existing software, forcing many CFOs to take a more active role in evaluating vendors,” said Alex Sobol, co-founder of Millennium Alliance, an invitation-only community for executives in North America and Europe.
“It seems like there’s a new AI vendor emerging every hour,” he said. “It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s fake, what’s good and what’s bad.”