‘Pretty Crazy’ Token Usage Is Testing Bosses’ Bet on AI
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- 8x8 has saved roughly $5 million in annual costs over 18 months by canceling dozens of software and educational subscriptions after adopting Anthropic's Claude, and its annualized Claude bill remains 'well below' that figure, says chief transformation and business operations officer Joel Neeb.
- Royal Bank of Canada disclosed token usage surged 500% over six months, while Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said 'the token usage is getting pretty, pretty crazy' with a third of employees using an internal AI chatbot daily, and Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates said top engineers are 'spending thousands of dollars a month or more on tokens.'
- Roughly 300 companies discussed AI token costs in earnings calls or analyst meetings in April–May, up from 93 a year earlier, according to a WIRED review of AlphaStreet transcripts — a sign of how fast 'tokenomics' has climbed the corporate agenda.
- Baseball Lifestyle 101 told about 50 top managers to spend the equivalent of 20% of their salary on AI tokens monthly, with costs projected to exceed $100,000 a month by year's end; cofounder Bill Rom credits Claude with landing a $1 million order by flagging low inventory on the brand's ice-cream-patterned shorts.
- 8x8 is weighing usage caps on Claude for the first time, particularly for the newly released Claude Opus 4.8 model, which costs nearly 1.7 times more than Anthropic's February offering — staff might need to prove older models can't do the job before getting access.
- At 8x8, all 1,800 full-time employees monitor their Claude usage on a shared dashboard; in May, product and customer success teams were heaviest users, while sales and finance (28% of headcount) consumed just 15% of tokens.
Why it matters: AI spending has shifted from an engineering line item to a C-suite preoccupation in months: 300 companies flagged token economics in recent earnings calls, up from 93 a year ago, and some are now tying token budgets to employee salaries or preparing to gate access to premium models. The 8x8 example shows the upside — $5 million saved by replacing dozens of SaaS subscriptions — but only if companies track which tasks need which model tier; the newly released Claude Opus 4.8 costs nearly 1.7x older versions, so a single mis-routed prompt can quietly inflate a department's bill.
