Amazon shuts token use dashboard, firms refocus

tokenmaxxing reality – Silicon Valley’s “tokenmaxxing” push—measuring workers by how many AI tokens they generate—has hit a reality check. Amazon shut an internal AI-use dashboard after staff used it to climb leaderboards, and other executives say benefits aren’t yet tied to higher

For weeks. some Amazon staff had a simple way to “win” at work: use AI. rack up tokens. and watch the numbers climb. Then the dashboard went dark. Last week. Amazon closed an internal dashboard that tracked AI use after some staff performed tasks just to climb the leaderboard. the Financial Times reported.

Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice president, told staff: “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.” He added: “Use AI to help you solve customer problems, to help you solve business problems, to innovate.”

Amazon says the effort that preceded the shutdown wasn’t meant to turn AI into a scoreboard. An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that employees set up the unofficial dashboard a few weeks ago to “drive awareness” of how AI can accelerate work and that it “was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage’s sake.”.

Amazon isn’t the only company recalibrating as leaders wrestle with a practical question: when does AI spending pay off? Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, said in an interview released in late May that he has yet to see improvements directly linked to increased AI spending.

Skepticism is spreading fast across the industry, and some see the debate over tokenmaxxing as a sign of a bubble. OpenAI and Anthropic are both looking to go public this year. adding fuel to conversations about whether the current push for AI consumption has gotten ahead of measurable results. “If enough other companies report the same. the bubble pops. ” Gary Marcus. an AI researcher and professor emeritus at New York University. wrote on X last week about Uber’s experience.

Behind the buzzwords, costs are becoming harder to ignore. Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot is moving from a fixed monthly payment to usage-based billing this week. In an April blog post. GitHub said it had so far absorbed much of the rising cost of its technology. and the fixed pricing model is “no longer sustainable.”.

The shift is part of a broader trend. GitHub Copilot’s move follows other changes, including Anthropic and OpenAI, in moving away from flat-rate seats to usage-based billing for business customers. While some developers have been irritated by price changes, investors view it as a market maturing.

“For the past year, a lot of AI products were effectively subsidizing usage in the race for growth. Now the bill is showing up,” Barry Downes, the managing partner at investment firm Sure Valley Ventures, told Business Insider. He added: “That’s a healthy transition, not a warning sign.”

In the middle of the debate, the cost side isn’t staying still. Costs could come down over time as AI companies develop more efficient models and use them to gain a competitive edge. Google. for example. says its latest Gemini 3.5 Flash model rivals frontier offerings at a lower price. as does Anthropic’s latest Opus 4.8 model. Business Insider’s Hugh Langley reports that Google has a strong position to reduce costs because it owns the full stack—chips. data centers. cloud. models. and many big applications.

That shift mirrors how competition is evolving. After years of AI labs competing on intelligence, they are now competing on intelligence per dollar, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and others offering smaller, more efficient models.

Tokenmaxxing, in this telling, is facing the same kind of scrutiny that comes when spending is measured too bluntly. Oded Tahori. the founder and CEO of Jeen.ai. has been tracking the shift away from tokenmaxxing as his startup helps organizations deploy AI and manage token spend. He told Business Insider that the tokenmaxxing craze stemmed from “FOMO” and companies not understanding the full challenge of building with AI.

Now, Tahori said, the focus is shifting to connecting spend to outcomes. “I think that they should have goals about budgets,” he said. “And a reason why to spend the money: if you want to spend a million on tokens, you should do something good with that in your business.”

He suggested rewarding employees who use AI to build things that benefit the company with a larger token budget and cutting the budget for those who might be “harming” it.

Some companies have already tried to measure impact rather than output. Visa rewards teams that use AI to supercharge their work with internal “points” that can be used to buy things like a coffee maker, Business Insider previously reported.

Tim Mills. managing partner at ACF Investors. framed the tokenmaxxing debate as less about a bubble and more about forcing utility to prove itself. “Tokenmaxxing artificially distorts usage statistics for non-productive reasons, so a clampdown is a constructive step forward,” he said. “It serves as a necessary reality check, reminding organizations that deploying these AI tools carries a very real infrastructure cost.”.

For now, Amazon’s closed dashboard is a small corporate decision with a big symbolic weight: it signals that the industry’s attention may be moving away from how much AI people use and toward why it should matter.

AI tokenmaxxing Amazon dashboard Dave Treadwell Uber AI spending Andrew Macdonald GitHub Copilot usage-based billing Anthropic OpenAI Gemini 3.5 Flash Opus 4.8 Jeen.ai Visa points Sure Valley Ventures