To rein in wanton AI spending, we need AI ‘nutrition labels’

Over the past year, tech-forward companies have gorged themselves on AI, gobbling up more and more tokens, the base unit of AI use. The scale is staggering. Google alone now processes more than 3.2 quadrillion tokens a month, roughly seven times what it handled a year earlier. Meanwhile, Uber burned through its entire artificial intelligence budget for 2026 by April—four months into the year. After encouraging heavy AI use through token leaderboards and tokenmaxxing, tech companies are ready to pull back, and rightly so. Companies with no handle on their AI usage see worse returns. One study found that organizations with full visibility into their AI operating costs were five times as likely as others to report established ROI. Companies want more value from their AI, but struggle to get the employees they pushed toward it to change their behavior. The central problem is that most folks simply don’t know how much energy and computing resources even the smallest prompt consumes. AI became easy to use before its cost became easy to understand. However, the most effective AI-using companies won’t go on a crash diet. Instead, they’ll use AI tools that give their employees access to cl…