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The trend of tokenmaxxing has gone too far. That\u2019s at least according to Cognition CEO Scott Wu, who argues that as companies scramble to rein in AI spending, they should focus on employee productivity instead of AI use.<\/p>\n
In an episode of the \u201cFounders\u201d podcast with David Senra, Wu said that as companies are shelling out on token budgets, there needs to be a push to identify how AI is creating real value, which comes from defining clear returns on investment for the technology, including revenue growth, efficiency gains, or cost-saving. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is directionally correct, but I think there are definitely some places where people have gotten carried away,\u201d Wu said of tokenmaxxing. \u201cPeople are like, \u2018We rank our engineers by how many tokens they\u2019re spending.\u2019 Well, let\u2019s try and rank people by how much output they\u2019re actually producing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cognition measures its success in how much it is able to increase engineering capacity. The AI software company is the creator of Devin, widely considered the first AI coding agent. Financial institutions like Goldman Sachs use the tool as an AI software engineer, while auto companies like Mercedes-Benz and Rivian use Devin for research and development.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wu\u2019s remarks come after reports of companies like Meta and Amazon creating internal incentives, such as employee leaderboards, to measure token usage to encourage workers to discover AI use cases. But rather than drive innovation, the use of tokens became excessive, with employees using AI just to boost their leaderboard rankings. The tech companies soon scrapped the internal tracking after employees deployed the bots to complete useless tasks, the Financial Times<\/em> reported.<\/p>\n \u201cPlease don\u2019t use AI just for the sake of using AI,\u201d Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, reportedly told staff.<\/p>\n The tokenmaxxing trend has also taken a financial toll on tech companies, such as Uber, which burned through its entire AI budget for 2026 in just four months, and last month capped token spending for employees to $1,500 per month. Despite tokens becoming cheaper as the technology improves\u2014dropping 90% in price since 2023\u2014companies\u2019 AI spending has actually increased, as a result of companies feeling emboldened to gobble up more tokens as they decrease in price. As AI spending balloons, Wu warns that those dollars spent are only as valuable as the benefits they create.<\/p>\n \u201cThe GPUs are expensive, but if your engineers are actually able to ship three times more, then it\u2019s very clearly worth it,\u201d Wu said. \u201cYou just want to make sure you\u2019re doing it the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n This lopsided spending-to-output ratio is what Boston Consulting Group (BCG) noted as a hallmark reason why AI wasn\u2019t creating productivity gains in the workplace. Employees don\u2019t know what to do with the time new tools have saved them.\u00a0<\/p>\n BCG\u2019s 2026 Global AI at Work report, which surveyed nearly 12,000 frontline employees, found that 42% of workers reported regular AI use saving them eight hours per work\u2014about one workday per week\u2014but 66% said they received little to no guidance on how to invest the time they saved, and half of respondents said they weren\u2019t spending that saved time on other strategic projects.<\/p>\n David Martin, global leader of BCG\u2019s People & Organization practice, told Fortune<\/em> <\/em>that the workplace productivity paradox emerging alongside AI is actually a human-created problem of leadership not communicating clear goals around the technology.<\/p>\n \u201cSenior leaders are really struggling to articulate what the vision and strategy is on AI,\u201d Martin said. \u201cConsequently, it increases employee fear. It makes it harder for them to even understand what objectives they\u2019re pushing for, and it trickles through to adoption, usage, and the like.\u201d<\/p>\n Mirroring Wu\u2019s philosophy around identifying AI\u2019s ROI in specific workplace environments, Martin suggested C-suites and managers treat AI as any other novel workplace tool, weighing its potential benefits instead of treating it like a productivity panacea.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of companies just gave AI to everyone, regardless of position, and I think now they\u2019ll say, \u2018Well, let\u2019s be more thoughtful about who has access, and what is the business case? And are we delivering on it, ultimately?\u2019\u201d Martin said. \u201cThen holding people accountable to meeting their targets, just like they would anything non-AI that they\u2019ve been doing for the past 100 years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Cognition #CEO #Scott #Tech #companies #carried #token #leaderboards<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The trend of tokenmaxxing has gone too far. That\u2019s at least according to Cognition CEO Scott Wu, who argues that as companies scramble to rein in AI spending, they should… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[328,12693,369,12692,1292,12694,887,2642,602,5076,3680,5888],"class_list":["post-11051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-automation","tag-carried","tag-ceo","tag-cognition","tag-companies","tag-leaderboards","tag-productivity","tag-scott","tag-tech","tag-tech-companies","tag-token","tag-tokens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why tokenmaxxing failed<\/strong><\/h2>\n