Uber's CTO said the company's tokenmaxxing era is coming to an end.
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Uber is shutting the door on its infamous tokenmaxxing era.In a Wednesday X post, Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said the company is seeing some "very interesting trends on AI costs," and that this was "another signal that we're coming to the end of the so-called 'tokenmaxxing' era."Tokenmaxxing is an enterprise AI trend that emerged in the first half of 2026, in which companies urge their employees to adopt AI as much as possible in their workflows. Some companies made AI usage a performance metric that staff would be evaluated on.Naga said that since the beginning of the year, the number of people at Uber using frontier AI tools has quadrupled, but this has coincided with a decline in per-AI-token costs.The company managed to lower costs by improving its prompt caching process, using better default models, giving engineers better visibility into their AI usage, and experimenting with open-weight models, Naga wrote in his post."The next phase, whatever we call it, will not be characterized by who spends the most tokens, but about how people use them as efficiently as possible," he added.Uber's finance chief, Balaji Krishnamurthy, shared similar updates during the company's second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
