Companies' new budget-friendly approach to AI could create a corporate caste system

Andreas Arnold/picture alliance via Getty Images This post originally appeared in the Business Insider Today newsletter. You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here . Companies are giving their AI consumption the GLP treatment. Pushing an AI-over-everything mentality isn't cheap. And now that the bills are due, some executives are telling workers to rein in their usage. Mind you, this is the same group that was building literal AI leaderboards . But "tokenmaxxing" isn't as fun when AI giants start raising prices and switch to usage-based pricing. BI's Stephen Council, Polly Thompson, and Charles Rollet spoke to workers and executives about the whiplash they're experiencing as AI goes from an all-you-can-eat buffet to à la carte on a budget . The pivot has the potential to predetermine winners and losers internally, depending on how much or little of an AI budget you're given. Companies have the added challenge of an even bigger question: Where's the ROI on these AI bets ? Judging productivity by AI token usage is falling out of favor. But an industry standard for measuring ROI still hasn't materialized. (I spoke to a veteran CFO about navigating that .) Companies' new AI diets won't be applied evenly, widening the gap between the AI haves and have-nots. The teams with the biggest budgets will have the best chance of proving AI's value. The ones that don't may not get the opportunity to shine. Ideally, resources will flow to the best ideas. But the projects with the most AI tokens might just look like the best ideas because of the extra budget. Executives might also fall into the sunk-cost fallacy, unwilling to pull back on a project they've already bet big on. The result is a quasi-caste system for AI tokens that's bound to ruffle feathers internally. And it's the type of thing that could be tough to shake once you put it in motion. Read the original article on Business Insider