Beyond automation: How much does AI really cost?

The problem nobody budgeted for An anonymous enterprise recently spent $500 million in a single month on Claude AI — not because the technology failed, but because nobody set usage limits before rolling it out to employees. Uber exhausted its entire AI budget for 2026 before the first half of the year ended . JPMorgan published a report titled “ AI Token Costs Are Eating into Internet Profits .” Shopify, Spotify, ServiceNow and Roku all cited AI as a major source of operational expense pressure