GoKawiilMajor tech companies are struggling to justify the skyrocketing prices of heavy AI usage, with even major tech firms like Microsoft and Uber looking at changes to their AI process. Following the recent viral post from Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga that the company had blown through its entire 2026 AI budget in just a few months, Uber's Operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said that token usage just didn't seem to have a direct correlation with useful consumer features.
Microsoft began revoking its developers' access to the Claude Code programming assistant earlier this month, with plans to move them over to the internal Copilot CLI tool by June 30. Although that has been framed as consolidating its teams onto the tools it's developing, it also comes right at the end of Microsoft's fiscal year, suggesting it may have also been a move to cut costs before the new year.
Worsening matters, Goldman Sachs estimates that Agentic AI could see token use increase by over 24 times in just the next few years. There appears to be a growing disconnect between AI needs, AI wants, and the reality of what AI companies can actually afford as costs mount.
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We've been hearing reports for months about how companies and CEOs are struggling to find the tangible benefit of heavy AI deployment. Uber appears to be the latest AI boosting company to have this come to Jesus moment, following the CTO's explosive claims of annual budgets being wiped out in mere months. In the interview with Business Insider, Andrew Macdonald lamented that there just wasn't a clear correlation between the money Uber was investing in AI use and real consumer feature development.
Having talked to the senior engineers, he said there was no link between higher token usage and a proportional increase in consumer features with real benefits for their customers. Although he admitted more code was being shipped, it "was very hard to draw a line" between that and improvements in the software.
Meanwhile, after opening up its workers to Claude Code subscriptions in December last year, Microsoft is now clawing that back in what's seen by many as a financial move, as much as a consolidation. Microsoft also recently announced the switch of Copilot on GitHub to token-based billing, as the cost of running the tool ballooned earlier this year.
A major reason for this is the explosive growth in agentic AI use. These agents can eat up more than 1,000 times the tokens of a single AI chatbot.
Are more tokens really the answer?
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