CBA chief executive Matt Comyn used the phrase ‘work slop’ to describe the low-quality AI output now flowing through corporate workflows, as token-billed AI costs scale with task complexity.
Matt Comyn, chief executive of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, used a speech on Monday to flag two AI-adoption problems large corporate buyers have been working through quietly for several months.
The first is that the cost of running generative AI inside corporate workflows is rising substantially faster than most companies budgeted for as task complexity scales.
The second is what Comyn called “work slop”, the low-quality AI-generated text, code and analysis that flows through internal company systems when employees use AI without sufficient quality control.
The cost framing is the part that will resonate with the corporate-IT-buyer audience. Token-based pricing, the per-character billing model the foundation-model labs use to charge enterprise customers, has scaled in the past 18 months from a modest line item into a meaningful operating-expense category.
