Token bills are now a C-suite conversation. Royal Bank of Canada's CEO disclosed last month that the bank's token usage jumped 500% over six months. Roughly 300 companies addressed questions about AI tokens on earnings calls in April or May, according to transcripts from AlphaStreet — up from 93 companies that mentioned the word a year earlier. At communications software maker 8x8, the math still works: the company estimates $5 million in annual savings over the past 18 months from canceling subscriptions Claude made redundant, and its annualized Claude bill sits well below that figure.
That gap is shrinking everywhere. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 last month at nearly 1.7 times the price of the February model it replaces. New, more capable, more expensive frontier models ship roughly monthly, and finance teams are trying to figure out which prompts justify the top-shelf option and which can be routed to something cheaper. Joel Neeb, 8x8's chief transformation and business operations officer, said the savings-versus-spend gap currently "makes my chief financial officer happy" — but he expects it to close as adoption deepens.
At Cisco, a third of employees use an internal AI chatbot daily. Top engineers at analytics firm Amplitude are spending thousands of dollars a month or more on tokens, according to CEO Spenser Skates. Box CEO Aaron Levine called the token budgeting conversation one of the most important and heated topics inside enterprise software companies right now.
“the token usage is getting pretty, pretty crazy”— Chuck Robbins, Cisco CEO
Key facts
- 01Royal Bank of Canada's token usage surged 500% over six months, its CEO disclosed last month.
- 02Roughly 300 companies addressed AI token questions on earnings calls in April or May, up from 93 a year earlier.
- 038x8 has saved about $5M in annual costs over 18 months by canceling software subscriptions that [Claude](/claude) replaced.
- 04Baseball Lifestyle 101 told 50 top managers to spend 20% of their salary on AI tokens monthly, a tab projected to top $100K/month by year-end.
- 05[Claude](/claude) Opus 4.8, released last month, costs nearly 1.7x more than the February model it replaces.
The reaction splits two ways. Some companies are introducing caps and routing logic — pick the cheapest model that gets the job done. Others are doing the opposite and telling employees to spend more, on the theory that the bottleneck is adoption, not cost.
Long Island-based clothing brand Baseball Lifestyle 101, which expects $250 million in sales this year, sits firmly in the second camp. In April, the company told about 50 top managers to spend the equivalent of 20% of their salary on AI tokens every month. Cofounder Bill Rom told Wired the tab is likely to exceed $100,000 a month by year-end.
It's already paying for itself, by his telling. Claude recently flagged that a retailer was running low on specific sizes of the company's ice-cream-patterned shorts, surfacing a $1 million order. Rom argues that inspiring employees to use AI has to come before financial ground rules.
“That's a day and a half of work that can now happen in an hour or two that might make me eight figures of additional revenue over 12 months”— Bill Rom, Baseball Lifestyle 101 cofounder and chief strategy officer
At 8x8, the philosophy is different but the destination is similar. All of the company's roughly 1,800 full-time employees see a dashboard showing how much they and their colleagues use Claude. Neeb described the visibility as collegial pressure rather than enforcement — "it's not punitive in the least." The product and customer success teams were among the heaviest users in May; sales and finance, which together account for 28% of employees, generated just 15% of token consumption.
Neeb said 8x8 is now openly discussing caps for the first time, driven by internal uptake of Opus 4.8. Access to Opus going forward may require proving an older model can't do the job. Neeb cut the token usage on one of his own automations — a daily email summarizing AI tips from YouTube — by 80% after asking Claude to rework it to run more cheaply.
“Can we downgrade the model a little bit and still get the same outcome?”— Joel Neeb, 8x8 chief transformation and business operations officer
The 8x8 stack didn't start with Claude. About two years ago the company rolled out training on OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini before standardizing on Claude over the past year. Revenue has grown for four consecutive quarters, and customer satisfaction has trended higher, though Neeb concedes attributing those moves cleanly to AI is difficult.
Management has been blunt with employees who haven't picked up the tools. Neeb said anyone not using AI in some capacity is missing the chance to go faster than peers, and the company is monitoring usage with consequences attached. Reports from Amazon and Meta have described employees either bolting AI onto their work performatively or pocketing the freed-up time, both of which Neeb wants to avoid by tying adoption to accountability.
The risk on the other side is real. Models are getting more expensive faster than enterprise budgets are growing, and the productivity case for the most expensive tier is rarely a clean one. Cisco, Box, Amplitude, and Royal Bank of Canada are all building or buying systems to route prompts to the cheapest viable model, which is a tacit admission that paying frontier prices for every task doesn't pencil.
Tokenomics is the line item that didn't exist two years ago, and it's about to reshape how enterprises buy AI. The companies winning on it aren't the ones with the strictest caps or the loosest budgets — they're the ones building the routing layer that picks the right model for the right prompt. That's a wedge for Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to compete on price tiers rather than just capability, and a wide-open market for whoever builds the model-routing infrastructure underneath.
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