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From tokenmaxxing to ROI-maxxing: Why enterprises are finally putting a price on AI

Fortune India charts the move from tokenmaxxing to ROI: Uber spent its ~$3.4B-equivalent annual AI budget in four months and capped engineers at $1,500/mo, while only 21% of firms have mature agentic-AI governance, per Deloitte.

Published 2026-06-20Source: Fortune India
Fortune India source artwork

Why it matters

It reframes runaway agent bills as a governance gap, not a pricing problem. With per-engineer coding-agent costs running $500–$2,000/mo and Gartner pegging AI-governance-platform spend at $492M this year, finance needs controls AI consumption never had.

Tokenmaxxing read

The fix isn’t cheaper tokens. BCG’s Jain calls excess consumption a symptom of weak tooling and memory — agents that pile on context to cover bad design. Track cost per outcome: only 4–5% of spend even reaches model providers; the rest is orchestration you can engineer down.

Source takeaway

Fortune India’s Jun 20 report leans on named operators — EY’s Mahesh Makhija, BCG’s Jain, R Systems’ Srikara Rao (who cites 30–35% better cost visibility from consolidation) — plus Deloitte, Gartner and McKinsey’s finding that 94% see no significant AI value.

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