BCG official says companies 'need to start the pump' on spending AI tokens

2 hours ago 3

Sylvain Duranton of Boston Consulting Group poses for a photo

Companies need to start measuring their AI token usage, BCG's Sylvain Duranton told Business Insider.
Duranton said that companies should also understand the risks of holding back too much.
"I think you need to start the pump," he said.

There's pressure on employees to up their AI token consumption.

Sylvain Duranton, global leader of BCG X, Boston Consulting Group's tech build and design division, said companies need to ensure they are preparing for the future.

"I think you need to start the pump," Duranton told Business Insider.

Asked about how companies should think about a "Tokenmaxxing" culture, Duranton said early on, companies will go all out before steering their token allocation more.

"I feel in the early days, companies will be pushing for massive usage and then progressively allocation, thinking around that, all of that will progress," he said. "But today being too restrictive, I think from the get-go on that usage, I'm not sure it's good."

Tokens are how large language models break down words into numerical inputs and outputs, and are essentially the building blocks of AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude. The conversation around token consumption has changed drastically in the past month or so, as the explosion of AI agents has altered how users and companies consume AI.

Not everyone is fully embracing the push.

Duranton said C-suites are strained between CFOs who are seeing the explosion in AI budgets and CIOs who are saying that "Engineers who are not burning one million tokens per day, they're not doing their job."

"There's a tension between all CFOs who start to go, 'My God, this is going to cost a lot,' and the notion that that's how you will make a difference, because those super users will be super effective, high productivity, they need to use the tokens," he said.

There's also tension within teams between engineers who want to keep doing that work and those who are deploying all the AI tools they can.

"We see even in software engineering teams, you have some people who burn, burn, burn, burn, burn, and you have super strong engineers who stay out," Duranton said, adding the latter group is putting themselves "on the trajectory to become obsolete."

For companies looking to find their bearings, Duranton said "the first thing" companies need to do is to start measuring token consumption, if they don't already.

One criticism of "Tokenmaxxing" leaderboards is that token consumption alone doesn't reveal what an employee is doing.

"If everyone is burning tokens to write poems and do pictures, there's not much benefit," Duranton said. "If those tokens are burned to create a massive jump in productivity or sales conversion in the customer center, it makes a huge difference for the company."

Duranton said companies will compete over the most efficient use of tokens, just as they do with recruiting.

"Companies have been competing from a strategic standpoint on resource allocation, and those resources were people and they were capital," he said, adding, "I think tokens will be the next one."