An anonymous enterprise recently spent $500 million in a single month on Claude AI — not because the technology failed, but because nobody set usage limits before rolling it out to employees. Uber exhausted its entire AI budget for 2026 before the first half of the year ended. JPMorgan published a report titled “AI Token Costs Are Eating into Internet Profits.” Shopify, Spotify, ServiceNow and Roku all cited AI as a major source of operational expense pressure in recent earnings calls. This is not a technology problem. It is a cost modelling problem. Most organizations ask the right first questions: What work should be AI-enabled? Which deployment approach fits each domain? But there is a third question that is almost never asked before launch: How much will it cost to operate this at scale? The answer requires understanding three parameters simultaneously — and the interaction between them is deeply counterintuitive.

Full report : Your senior execs using high-token AI aren’t busting your budget; it’s the quiet, high-frequency automated background tasks that are secretly draining millions.