‘What we’re seeing right now is just rapid escalation in AI token spend’: Accenture tells staff to stop using AI for unnecessary tasks amid surging costs

Accenture has told some staff to roll back the use of AI for basic tasks due to skyrocketing prices.

According to reports from 404 Media, leaked audio from an internal meeting at the consulting giant highlighted growing concerns about "soaring token spend".

To battle that, leaders at Accenture are pushing back against token use by "non-engineers" who are driving excessive use of the technology on unnecessary tasks, such as converting PDFs to slides, according to internal company data.

The move comes after a report in February revealed the consultancy has introduced new measures to monitor staff AI use, prompting a rise of “tokenmaxxing” by employees to showcase their uptake of the technology.

“What we’re seeing right now is just rapid escalation in AI token spend,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead reportedly said in the meeting, according to the report.

He added that Accenture has hit an "inflection point" with unpredictable spend, saying C-level executives are "still asking the question of whether they’re getting value from what we’re spending on in the context of AI."

Kwak reportedly noted that Accenture's problem isn't "niche" but one that will be faced by every AI-using enterprise – and that offers an opportunity to the consultancy to offer services unpicking token use to its own clients.

ITPro approached Accenture for comment, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

Accenture isn’t alone on rising AI costs

Accenture is by no means the first company to introduce measures aimed at limiting excessive AI use in recent months. Indeed, a host of major firms have issued warnings to staff due to rising token costs.

As ITPro reported last week, rising AI costs are the result of a combination of factors, most notably the shift to consumption-based pricing on the part of providers, and the tokenmaxxing trend.

Anthropic, for example, has shifted to usage-based billing and raised costs for some users, though also increased caps for others.

GitHub in April rejigged its pricing model, leading to credits now being consumed based on token usage, a model known as token-metered or token-based pricing. The more AI tokens used, the more a company is billed.

Combined with the rapid acceleration of AI use, some firms have been hit with huge bills. One unnamed company reportedly failed to set usage limits and accidentally spent $500 million on Claude.

This has prompted some businesses to take drastic action to rein in AI spending, including the introduction of token caps and spending limits.

Uber capped employees to $1,500 a month in tokens after blowing through its entire AI budget in just four months, for example. Elsewhere, Walmart limited staff usage of its internal AI agent while Microsoft removed access to Anthropic's Claude Code over costs.

Amazon and Meta have also reportedly removed their AI "leaderboards" designed to encourage AI usage in an effort to end "tokenmaxxing".

Costly even when useful

The leaked meeting notes from Accenture suggest the consultancy is keen to limit AI use for unnecessary tasks, but continue to give engineers plenty of tokens to play with.

Reducing tokens in one part of the business and allocating more to engineers might not be a concrete solution, however. Indeed, Gartner analysts told ITPro last week that AI coding costs could soon surpass developer salaries.

With this in mind, the consultancy said a concerted focus on cost optimization practices will be needed to limit surging costs on this front – yet many are woefully underprepared to introduce such measures.

“Most organizations still lack the maturity and frameworks to effectively measure cost versus business impact," Nitish Tyagi, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner, told ITPro.

"Software engineering leaders are increasingly concerned as token-driven AI spend becomes harder to justify, with budgets often being depleted earlier than expected."

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