Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs
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Business | Token reckoning<br>Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs<br>The rage for tokenmaxxing is coming to an end<br>Share
Illustration: Nick Little
Jun 14th 2026|4 min read
“It’s going to be an absolute nightmare,” says an executive at a big American tech company. He is talking about an emerging problem for businesses that use artificial intelligence. AI agents—bots that can read, interpret and act—use masses of processing power and have started to run up huge bills. As they proliferate, the problem will grow. Big companies, the executive points out, typically use hundreds of software programs. If each of those offer agents (as they probably will), AI costs could easily spiral out of control.
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