Source: SiliconANGLE
As generative AI consumption scales beyond forecasting models, companies are adopting token-based accounting—treating compute like a traded commodity to match costs to actual usage rather than capacity planning. Finance teams built budgets around fixed infrastructure costs, but API-driven AI consumption creates variable, unpredictable expenses that balloon when usage patterns shift mid-quarter. The move toward tokenomics as a discipline suggests enterprises have abandoned traditional cost containment in favor of making spending visible enough to optimize—an acknowledgment that AI has become a production input whose consumption they cannot reliably control.