Employees are under pressure to consume more AI tokens.
Sylvain Duranton, global leader of BCG
“I think we need to start the pumps,” Duranton told Business Insider.
When asked how companies should think about a “Tokenmaxxing” culture, Duranton said companies will go all out early on before making further adjustments to their token allocations.
“Early on, companies will push for bulk usage, and then they’ll gradually allocate and focus on that and everything will go forward,” he said. “But there are so many restrictions today that I’m not sure that’s a good way to use it in the first place.”
Tokens are how a large language model breaks down words It is converted into numeric inputs and outputs and is essentially the building block of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic. Claude. The conversation around token consumption has changed dramatically over the past month or so, as the explosion of AI agents has changed the way users and businesses utilize AI.
Not everyone has fully embraced this push.
Duranton said executives are in tension between CFOs who see AI budgets exploding and CIOs who argue that “engineers who don’t spend a million tokens a day aren’t doing their jobs.”
“There’s a tension between all the CFOs who start saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to cost a lot of money,’ and the idea that this is the way to make a difference, because superusers are very capable and productive, and they need to use tokens,” he said.
There is also tension within the team between engineers who want to keep their jobs and those who are implementing as many AI tools as possible.
「ソフトウェアエンジニアリングチームであっても、燃えて燃えて燃えて燃えて燃え続ける人がいる一方、外に出ない非常に強力なエンジニアもいる」とデュラントン氏は述べ、後者のグループは「時代遅れになる軌道に乗っている」と付け加えた。
Duranton said the “first thing” for companies looking to find direction is to start measuring their token consumption if they haven’t already done so.
One criticism of the “Tokenmaxxing” leaderboard is that token consumption alone does not reveal what employees are doing.
“There’s not much benefit if everyone burns tokens to write poems or draw pictures,” Duranton said. “If you can burn these tokens to significantly increase customer center productivity and sales, it will make a big difference for your company.”
Duranton said that similar to recruitment efforts, companies will compete for the most efficient use of the token.
“Companies have competed from a strategic perspective of resource allocation, and those resources were human resources and capital,” he said, adding, “I think tokens will be next.”