Accenture appears to also be wrestling with the same problem on behalf of its clients. Leaked audio obtained by 404 Media in June captures executives acknowledging that token spending is climbing fast as companies move from simple chatbots to agentic workflows, and that nobody can reliably predict what a given task will cost or whether it was worth the money. Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead described it as ‘not a niche problem,’ and the firm is reportedly building an advisory tool called ‘Token IQ’ to help customers manage the bill. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously acknowledged that AI token costs had become 'a huge issue ', as companies faced mounting bills from heavy AI use.
Amazon, however, says it has not imposed token caps on its employees. According to CNBC , however, it shut down an internal leaderboard in May after workers were found gaming it to climb the rankings — an early example of the behavior the new guidelines are meant to discourage.
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Newton Gitonga Freelance Writer Newton Gitonga is a tech journalist covering gadgets, PC hardware, AI, data centers, and the wider tech industry. His interest in technology started early, taking apart things around the house to see how they worked, often to his dad’s frustration. His curiosity sometimes got the better of him, including a few failed attempts to fix laptops, one of them a gifted Dell XPS. He has previously written for Notebookcheck, ZyCrypto, CoinCentral, and Crypto News Flash.
bigdragon Amazon shut down the token leaderboard, but I don't see anything about removing tokens as a metric to measure productivity. People will continue to tokenmax until such a metric is replaced with a different metric that can be gamed in another way. This is the way of things. Personally, I love the idea of tokenmaxxing. Management wants to use AI to replace employees so we should minimize the cost savings from doing so. Reply
Darkhands This is the problem with all metrics. Eventually, improving the metric itself becomes the goal, not the original task the metric was meant to track. All large corporations suffer from this problem. It's far better to do a thing that makes the spreadsheet look good, vs the thing that the spreadsheet was meant to track in the first place. The two are rarely the same. It's why you have people asking for high scores on surveys after their work, for example (actual work doesn't reflect the spreadsheet). Or why people close tickets before the work is actually done (making the spreadsheet ticket time look good is more important than actually doing the work it was meant to track). And on and on. Reply
Kindaian Then, how about stop using stupid metrics to measure productivity? Reply
Darkhands Kindaian said: Then, how about stop using stupid metrics to measure productivity? I'd also like world peace and a gold toilet pls 😉 For most middle managers, you can pry their metrics from their cold dead hands. Gotta justify their existence somehow. My company is good in that regard, they're a smaller company and resisting the siren song of unnecessary metrics for us so far. They know it just hurts things in the end. Reply
artk2219 Darkhands said: I'd also like world peace and a gold toilet pls 😉 For most middle managers, you can pry their metrics from their cold dead hands. Gotta justify their existence somehow. My company is good in that regard, they're a smaller company and resisting the siren song of unnecessary metrics for us so far. They know it just hurts things in the end. The golden toilet is at least attainable lol https://royaltoiletry.com/product/royal-gold-toilet/?attribute_drainage-type-pit-distance=180+mm+%2F+7+inch+(P-trap%2C+back+drainage) Reply
bill001g Kindaian said: Then, how about stop using stupid metrics to measure productivity? I used to kinda get in trouble all the time for this. My ticket close rate and time to close was much higher than other peoples. The problem was if someone else worked a ticket and got stuck and I picked it up I would get hit with the total time it was open. You also had people competing to grab the tickets that were extremely simplistic like changing a router name in some system. The metric system did not account for the difficulty of the ticket but luckily most the mangers knew that if they had to cut someone they could not cut the couple of guys that solved the really hard problems. Reply
Fomdoo It took them this long to get to that conclusion. Amazon is a joke. Reply
rgd1101 My guess is manager don't know what they are doing so using token measure that something even they can understand Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amazon-tells-engineers-to-stop-tokenmaxxing-to-look-productive-says-ai-will-be-central-to-software-development-but-usage-is-not-the-goal-new-guidelines-claim#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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