Box CEO Aaron Levie wrote on X that companies need to develop strategies for budgeting AI token consumption as usage expands across engineering and knowledge work. Levie predicted that AI budget increases will begin in engineering departments where developers can run multiple agents in parallel or have projects running overnight.

"This underlying concept and trend is going to be very real, because workers who properly leverage AI are only going to consume more of it," Levie wrote. He added that AI token consumption will eventually extend beyond engineering to other areas of knowledge work, citing legal and sales departments as potential major token users.

Tokens are units of text that represent a word or part of a word, determining how AI usage is measured and priced. Large Language Models that power chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok operate on token-based systems. AI companies typically charge more for using advanced models and for complex queries, with pricing varying based on usage patterns.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he would be deeply alarmed if an engineer earning $500,000 did not use AI tokens worth at least half that salary. "That $500,000 engineer at the end of the year, I'm going to ask them how much did you spend in tokens? If that person said $5,000, I will go ape something else," Huang said.

"Their compute budgets are just going to monotonically go up over time," he wrote. Levie identified software agents as likely to become the biggest AI token consumers, noting that these agents can run at any time.

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya reported experiencing cost increases from AI usage. "Our costs have more than tripled since November of 25. Between the inference cost that we pay AWS, which is ginormous, between our cost with Cursor, between Anthropic, we are just spending millions," Palihapitiya said. He said he instructed his startup 8090 to stop using the AI coding tool Cursor after observing high token spending.

Levie suggested that AI compute budgets may require new organizational approaches. He proposed that the chief financial officer might eventually serve as the head of AI within organizations.