Wait what? How? But wasn't AI the thing to make business save tons of money by replacing workers with an almost free "artificial worker"??

Are you telling me that, as everyone and their mothers were saying, this was just a lie? Who could've thought?!

Two trillion valuation, where are you going?

Alternate headline: C-Suite Execs Come To The Realization That AI Costs Money

I'm willing to bet that only a fraction of that spend was work task related.

If my productivity (and therefore my job) were measured not by results but by amount of tokens I use, you can bet I'm gonna burn tokens for absolutely everything during my work shift. Even if it's just asking the chatbot what time is it every second.

Exactly.

In my company some of the top users spend over $3000/m. $29 is maybe 30 mins - 1 hour continuous running for a *medium" sized model like Sonnet. Not sure about cheaper models.

The $29 cap signals that per-seat AI budgets cannot yet cover agentic coding tools, which cost heavy users anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a month.

It may be so, but that tells me even if they wanted to use it for productive work, it'd still cost them about that much.

I spent $200 in one session the other day, watching the clanker design, implement, and review the change.
Still have no idea what I did but my name is on the commit

I have a friend that works there. They told me about this, and I was like "per day?"

I was not prepared to learn that the budget was less than a dollar per day. Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.

Nevrr forget, Accenture used to be Arthur Anderson, of Enron infamy. They deserve any financial ruin they get, IMO.

Silly Accenture, that's not the way to tokenmaxx.

Sounds fulfilling.

/s

And it's going to cost a whole lot more once the investments dry up and they're going to have to actually pay for all the data centers under construction.

o.O my budget can be requested up to $2k/month.

$29/month is like... not using it lol

That's basically saying that they shouldn't use Claude at all.

For now, that's not crazy. I have a company-provided api key and subscription. Now maybe they bumped me to the a $100/mo tier without telling me, but as far as I know the lowest tier keeps me in tokens heat about all month and I use it a lot. I switch over to API for a few hours per month and probably spend more in that time than my sub costs all month.

I spent about $2k developing a set of tools and AI orchestrates them for me, and I can add new tools to orchestrate as needed. Caveat: I do more production support and my teams do the production development work. We are all on subscription plans, but they do more hand development than I do.

Point being, you can easily spend >$1k/mo and me and several people on my teams did before we got subscriptions, but the subs give some AI assistance without going all-in on AI coding, which is the sweet spot IMO.

Well duh? I doubt $29 get you anywhere at the moment and that nonsense is only going to get more expensive.

$29 is enough for one of them pro plans. That's plenty if you're not wasteful.

But do companies like Accenture get that subsidized plan at scale? At API rates that can easily be thousands of dollars.

Impossible. It would require C-suites:

1. having a brain
2. realize that they fucked up
3. accept it without having a brain aneurysm
4. making decisions to prevent that in the future

Fair point, but not any less fulfilling than my day job already was, arguably maybe a little more fun to be spending the company's money on nonsense. My job pays my bills very adequately, that's normally the only fulfilling thing about it.

The title is misleading. They didn't cap it, they just declared that if you are spending more than that, you have to be able to explain what you're spending it on and why, giving it a business reason and a project to associate the costs to, which I expect almost all Claude users at Accenture probably can. This is simply an accounting change, not a company-wide shutdown of Claude.

Heavy use remains possible, but it now needs a budget owner.

It goes back to being a tool, not just the method. Still quite productive.

Prolly not. When the bubble pops these data centers will be sold off for cents on the dollar and a bunch of the companies go bankrupt. There will be a glut of equipment, so prices will fall. People will buy up the scraps and provide compute services cheaper.

So only if it can be recharged to a customer

C-suite still on unlimited Claude plan

Ten times over.

Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.

Wouldn't that be terrible...

Good.

Sheeit thanks for the reminder (and trip down memory lane)

Fuck AA

Amateurs.

I'm spending 4000$ per month.

Interesting. Yeah, me and my coworkers spend about $1000 per month—so far. The bill keeps going up. One AI workshop thing they made us do spent $100 just in 1 session.

i saw a post that was something like "youd think the cocaine class would understand why the first hit is free"

You're more optimistic than I am. My bet is that when the bubble pops the government will step in to bail out these companies, especially household names like Nvidia, and none of the data center equipment ever finds its way into the hands of regular people. It's gonna get repurposed into a pillar of our surveillance hellscape, attempting to weed out people who are guilty of precrimes or thoughtcrimes, providing pretext to arrest political opponents and undesirables by going "they were dangerous! Our trillion dollar AI said so!"

I just want to put "$29 per month" into perspective:

Imagine a white collar employee earning $100K per year. $100K / 250 working days is $400 per day. Payroll tax and benefits can easily add +50% to that, so it's not a stretch to guess that our hypothetical employee costs the employer $600 per day.

$29 per 20 working days is about 1/4 of 1% of that cost.

If you're spending $1K per month on LLMs -- putting aside whether this is productive or ethical for a moment -- wouldn't it make more sense to just pony up the $5K-$10K or so that it would cost to provision a private, local model? Might that not actually be superior in terms of corporate security?

I hate it of course. I need to find an exit strategy

I mean, that's literally Accenture's default business model (same as almost any consulting/professional services company), so it shouldn't be surprising. My point is that it's not an indictment of AI, and their AI usage isn't actually going to go down; it's just Accenture doing Accenture things. They're not a charity, they're not using AI for fun, they're using it to make profit, and they make profit by charging their customers for every cent of AI they use on their behalf, usually with a hefty markup, in addition to everything and anything else they can justify charging against their customer's accounts. It's a very profitable business model, and I'm sure they love using AI for it and will continue using AI just as heavily if not even more in the future.

Definitely. We do this at my job. But a server big enough to provide a comparable service would cost at least $30k. And you likely need more than one. And you still need someone to maintain it.

The number of AI datacenters that are actually datacenters and not just fields of gravel is low.

Yeah it's basically useless for agentic work. Especially with frontier models.

Nvidia is the one selling the shovels during the gold rush. They're not at risk of going bust.

It's all the LLm companies leveraging themselves to the eye balls to buy Nvidia chips for their datacenters that are at risk.

Yeah, that's like the breakroom coffee budget for the employee that month...

I've heard that GPU's for this work are exceedingly hard to get ahold of as well. Glm 5, which i think is near frontier model capabilities, takes around 1.5 Tb of vram un-quantized.

It depends, sometimes the private API models are better at a specific task to the point it wouldn't be worth using one that is worse. (Really it's the harnesses around them tbh)

Overall sovereign AI is where it's at. If you have good enough tooling in place

Nah, they're getting suckers to build the data centers for them. US companies are getting tons of freebies/discounts/writeoffs from foreign countries to put these data centers in -- like Canada just announced Anthropic's going to have a massive data center in one of its tiny maritime provinces, likely enticed to the region via hand outs from the govt. They're bending over to accept big tech dick even as the country clings its pearls over sovereignty and the US fucking them over.

Carney's sorta like the old "lady in the streets, freak in the sheets" thing -- he's Anti-America/Pro-Canada sovereignty in his speeches/public appearances, but he's slobbing all over Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel's dicks behind closed doors. He's the ideal "girlfriend" for American imperialism. "Guk guk" yes sir, I can take ANOTHER datacenter!! "guk guk"

There's no news here. After the initial tryout phase every business I've seen introduced cost tracking. Seems like Accenture is doing the same now.

The $29 figure is doing a lot of quiet work in this story, because that's exactly what a Pro plan costs. So the real message isn't really a budget cap, it's 'stop expensing API tokens and expense a subscription instead'. I'd bet a chunk of that $1,000 spend was people wiring API access into internal tooling and prototypes, which feels productive right up until finance sees the invoice and has no idea what any of it maps to. The part that'll actually sting is that this is how a lot of shadow automation dies: not because it didn't work, but because nobody could explain the line item. At least a hard cap forces the conversation that should've happened months earlier.

explain what you’re spending it on and why, giving it a business reason and a project to associate the costs to

I love these chilling effects

Look at it this way, if I pay Open AI $1k a month, their people make sure it works they month. If I let Joe from finance spend $10k on computer parts, Joe needs to ensure that it runs or I need to hire someone who is knowledgeable on local models. If I'm a simple firm, $12k a year might be cheaper because someone else makes sure it works and I can fire Joe when the fancy autocorrect loses a bunch of clients by falsifying work. Then I don't have to spend even bigger bucks hiring a new Joe because no one knows how to work the damn server he replaced the break room with.