Good morning. For many companies, the biggest surprise in scaling AI isn’t performance—it’s the bill. Tokens, the units behind every AI interaction, are quickly becoming a key driver of cost and scrutiny.
In a new report released this morning, “AI is on your P&L. Most companies are only reading half of it,” Accenture’s Chief AI and Data Officer Lan Guan, a coauthor, argues that many companies are underestimating the financial implications of scaling AI. The issue is not just technical—it is managerial, cultural, and also revolves around token use, increasingly, a core concern for CFOs.
“My token cost from cloud code is shooting through the roof—this is a CFO conversation that I’m having constantly,” Guan told me. “Clients are ready to scale AI, but then they hit this unexpected cost wall.”
A lot of CFOs at large enterprise companies don’t even know where all these token costs are coming from, she explained; they just get the bill. Questions arise like: Who’s using tokens? Who’s building agents? Which product is contributing the most to the token consumption? “They’re literally telling me that they are walking in the dark,” Guan said.
One retail client, for example, deployed an AI-powered recommendation engine in a handful of pilot stores. The result: a monthly cloud bill in the millions, driven largely by token consumption. “Sales were increasing,” Guan said, “but the cost structure wasn’t anticipated.”
