EY has built what it calls an “AI router,” a system that steers each task to the cheapest model that can handle it, in an effort to keep its own soaring AI bills under control.
The tool, reported by Business Insider, is the Big Four firm’s answer to a problem now spreading across corporate IT: the cost of the tokens that AI consumes.The logic is simple arbitrage.
Not every request needs the most powerful, most expensive model, so a router sends easy work to a cheap one and reserves the pricey models for the hard problems, trimming the bill without obviously trimming the output.
EY has reason to watch the meter. The firm invests more than $1 billion a year in AI, runs a fleet of some 1,000 AI agents, and has seen its AI-related consulting revenue jump around 30%, a scale at which token costs stop being a rounding error, in a market where the most AI-obsessed firms spend thousands per employee a month.
Its own research shows the anxiety is widespread. In EY’s latest AI Pulse survey of 534 senior US business leaders, 82% said they were concerned about token-usage costs, and 98% of those using token-based tools said the costs had made them reconsider their strategy.
