Companies Evaluate Aggressive AI Spending as Costs Pile Up

What smart people are saying about AI costs: 'Where's the revenue?'

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have said they are hearing a lot from companies about rising AI costs. Uber COO Andrew Macdonald recently gave voice to those concerns.Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg; Sam Barnes/Sportsfile for Collision; and Benjamin Fanjoy via Getty ImagesAI and tech CEOs are getting an earful from CIOs.Uber COO Andrew Macdonald raised concerns that big AI bills aren't delivering enough ROI.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said t…

Companies evaluate aggressive AI spending as costs pile up

Companies are second-guessing their aggressive spending on AI, as the tech weighs on margins. AI has been pitched partly as an avenue for businesses to save money because of increased productivity — but corporations are now facing ballooning IT costs. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months because of Claude Code usage, and its COO said on a recent podcast that there isn’t yet a proven link between high AI adoption and useful …

Companies forced to pull back on AI spending as costs surge

A growing number of tech companies are beginning to question whether the massive cost of generative AI is sustainable, even as the industry continues to market artificial intelligence as the future of work. A viral X post this week claimed that “Amazon has reportedly scrapped its internal AI leaderboard as costs soared,” adding that a senior executive told staff: “don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.” Another X post listed several example…

‘Tokenmaxxing’ Starts to Fade as Companies Eye Agentic Coding Costs

Tech companies have spent the first half of this year burning through budgets for AI coding agents at a stunning pace. Now they’re starting to ask what they are getting for it — a crucial question for investors and companies across the industry who are counting on the current surge in demand to be a new normal.At Salesforce, which has been aggressively adopting agentic coding throughout its engineering corps, its initial token budget turned out …