Companies are learning that there's such a thing as spending too much on AI.
As the cost of AI tools grows, executives are recalibrating. Amazon recently removed its employee-made leaderboard for tracking AI token usage because it encouraged excessive spending. Walmart, which developed a vibe-coding tool for employees, recently set limits on the use of tokens. Uber COO Andrew MacDonald said it's hard to justify the money his company is spending on AI.
Cisco Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel also pushed back on the cost of tokens. He said at an event recently that the price is "far higher than the actual value these tokens are generating at scale."
For the consulting industry, the rise of AI was a near-existential threat. At first glance, chatbots can do a lot of the work of consultants, particularly those early in their careers. Most firms moved quickly to attract clients who needed help integrating the technology into their own companies. And they quickly adopted it themselves.
KPMG, for example, has built a dashboard to track how often employees in its US advisory division use AI tools, part of a broader effort to move from basic adoption to more sophisticated use. McKinsey plans to go further. CEO Bob Sternfels said in January that the firm uses roughly 25,000 AI agents alongside its 40,000 human employees, and hopes one or more agents will eventually support every employee.
The surge in spending, however, has raised a question: Are companies investing in AI strategically or simply spending to avoid being left behind? It's something consulting firms are working to answer for both their clients and themselves.
Tell us how AI spending has changed at your consulting firm:
For now, the answer appears to be: keep spending, but more strategically.
In a recent report on corporate AI investment, Boston Consulting Group found that companies expect to more than double their AI spending in 2026, from roughly 0.8% of revenue to about 1.7%. For large enterprises, that shift represents billions of dollars flowing into AI strategies that remain, in many cases, experimental and difficult to measure.
Russell Fradin, CEO and cofounder of Larridin, a platform that helps companies — including major consulting firms — measure the returns on AI usage, said the spending trend will continue.
"We haven't seen anyone talking about spending less in AI next year," Fradin told Business Insider. "They're just talking about instrumenting to understand where it goes."
Companies, Fradin said, are coming to the consensus that they "can't 10x spend every year forever."
