Why it matters
Agents burn orders of magnitude more tokens than chat, so budgets break quietly. Lucas reframes the real question as whether a company can operate AI at a return. Token leaderboards, ZDNET notes, are now obsolete.
Tokenmaxxing read
Synopsys CIO Sriram Sitaraman names the sharpest lever: an unscoped agent asked what to do tomorrow chews through data and returns nothing useful, while a narrowly defined North America sales ops agent limits consumption and raises value. Scope is the cost control.
Source takeaway
These leaders resist hard caps. Snowflake's Sridhar Ramaswamy is worried about inference spend but won't treat it as a reason to stop; Whoop's Matt Luizzi pairs guardrails with monitoring so staff see spend as they go.
