The price of AI is falling; why are enterprises still spending more? Explained

Artificial intelligence (AI) is turning sharply cheaper to run on a per-token basis. Yet, the amount companies spend on AI is rising as they move from experiments and chatbots to more complex, multi-step applications.

During a recent executive briefing, Coforge management said that over the previous seven months, the unit cost of tokens needed to deliver the same level of AI intelligence had fallen about 100-fold, while token consumption had grown about 8,000-fold.

The company also said open-weight models accounted for about 35% of token consumption on the platforms it was observing, compared with about 11–12% in early 2025.

There are broadly two types of models. Closed or proprietary models such as OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, keep their trained parameters under the developer’s control and are typically accessed through a hosted service or API.