Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash, collage by 404 Media with logos from Microsoft and Anthropic.
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio.
The news highlights a major shift in the tech industry and other companies that use AI: the wave of uninhibited AI growth is over. Some AI providers like GitHub are now charging customers per token rather than a flat subscription fee, leading some companies to burn through their tokens. Uber recently capped employees’ use of AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor; that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber’s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget in four months. And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.
It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks.
“We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors [...] you were talking about,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, said in a recent internal meeting, according to the audio obtained by 404 Media.
At one point in the meeting, Kwak and Eduardo Salamanca de Diego, senior manager of product management at the company’s Center for Advanced AI, start presenting about what is described as “token ops.”
Kwak says he knows people aren’t using slides these days, but he has some. As he appears to be preparing to present, Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into markdown: is that right?”
That’s when Kwak says that’s what Accenture’s own data shows.
“What we’re seeing right now is just rapid escalation in AI token spend,” he says “As companies start to scale AI, moving from like simple chatbots into use cases that feature agentic workflows and automation and then enterprise-wide deployment of some of these tools like Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex, we’re hitting this inflection point where AI is becoming material to the cost structure; spend is becoming very unpredictable; and leadership, especially at the CFO, COO, and CIO level, are still asking the question of whether they’re getting value from what we’re spending on in the context of AI.”
“It’s really not a niche problem. It is a problem that every enterprise will face if they are bullish on AI, if they haven’t already,” he adds. The amount of token spending is increasing “exponentially, as more and more people are starting to use AI.”
Kwak says after Accenture tried to get enterprises to adopt AI as quickly as possible, AI has reached scale in most areas in both Accenture and its clients. But with that scale is a new opportunity for Accenture regarding its clients: “to really think about token economics.” The bill of the overall AI spend is visible, Kwok explains, but attributing that AI spend at the token level to the value outcomes on the projects where AI is being used is not visible.
Finally, the “controls are just arriving too late.” Those are things that might stop someone spending a bunch of money on tokens, like budgeting or different tiers.
Following the Financial Times’ reporting of Accenture’s policy to force AI adoption or risk missing promotions, an Accenture spokesperson told CNBC, “Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work. That requires the adoption of the latest tools and technologies to serve our clients most effectively.”
Kwak says Accenture plans to formally launch a product called “Token IQ” soon. Accenture did not respond to a request for comment.
As 404 Media has reported, some startups have bragged about how much they’ve spent on AI instead of human workers. Walmart also capped its staff’s use of AI tools following high demand.
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So this is how the bubble pops. With people using AI for shit they could do otherwise. 
