Firms today are pushing employees to use as much AI as possible to squeeze out the technology’s productivity gains. But that pressure is leading to cracks, and those cracks may be irreparable.
“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” he said.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Microsoft didn’t provide a comment.
But with a token-based pricing system, the work gets more expensive with more use and better efficiency. Goldman Sachs recently forecasted that agentic AI could drive a 24-fold increase in token consumption by 2030 as consumers and enterprises adopt AI agents, reaching a staggering 120 quadrillion tokens per month. As businesses turn to AI agents to boost productivity, aggregate costs could rise sharply even if the price of each token falls.
“Chief Product Officers (CPOs) should not confuse the deflation of commodity tokens with the democratization of frontier reasoning,” Gartner senior director analyst Will Sommer warned in a statement.
Huang is part of a broader wave of CEOs touting an agentic future in which digital workers operate across the enterprise. But if token consumption rises faster than unit costs fall, that future could come with a much heavier bill than executives expect.
