From tokenmaxxing to sovereign alpha: Who controls your AI economics?
The artificial intelligence industry wants enterprises to measure progress in tokens, model calls and usage. But those are largely vendor-revenue metrics — not enterprise-value metrics.
The Canva example shows why.
On Aug. 6, The Information reported that Canva Inc. cut its 2026 revenue-growth forecast from 30% to 20% because its AI features cost far more to run than expected. Let that sink in: A company generating more than $900 million a quarter – and growing above 25% – lowered its outlook because of an input cost.
Canva said it had relied too heavily on expensive third-party frontier models. The fix was not a negotiated vendor discount. It rebuilt the stack with in-house models, Leonardo.AI and task-level routing – reportedly cutting the cost of an AI task by roughly 90%. Its video and image models were reportedly 17 and 30 times cheaper than frontier alternatives.
