Tokenmaxxing is on the way out, even as some of the biggest players in the tech industry are urging their employees to use AI as much as possible. A new Bloomberg report reveals that Apple is cutting employee budgets for AI token usage while remaining just as committed to deploying AI to boost efficiency.
Apple has already reduced the daily spending limit from $300 to $200 for certain engineers, according to Bloomberg, but the company reportedly plans to cut that down even more. Sources told Bloomberg that the daily cap could drop as low as $100 for some engineering teams. In many other departments, daily AI spending is already capped at $100; now Apple is considering reducing the limit to $25 for certain teams.
The spending limit is measured in tokens, which are units of AI usage that represent fragments of text or data processed by AI systems.
This move comes as Apple continues pressing its engineers and other employees to use AI more in day-to-day operations. But it also reflects a larger trend rippling across the tech industry, as companies struggle to justify their outsize spending on artificial intelligence.
After pushing their employees to adopt AI, many tech employers seem to be grappling with the fact that those investments have not yielded the productivity gains that they anticipated.
According to Bloomberg, some Apple employees believed many people weren’t making use of the $300 limit and that it was higher than needed. But other employees seemed to view it as a sign that Apple is looking to reduce costs—and that the company could resort to layoffs.
Bloomberg reports that Apple is already taking steps to streamline its operations in the interest of maximizing efficiency, and recently appointed CEO John Ternus is reportedly already advocating for reducing layers of management (something that Amazon has also sought to do over the last year).
There are plenty of signs tech companies are tightening their belts, even as they continue to prioritize AI adoption across their workforce. Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in a matter of months, leading the company to cap monthly spending at $1,500 for each AI coding tool. Companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla have all imposed token limits on their employees.
Beyond AI spend, however, the fear of layoffs looms large across the tech industry.
A steady stream of employers have trimmed head count in the last year due to AI investments, either to offset exorbitant AI spending or because AI has enabled them to cut back on certain jobs. A number of companies, including Microsoft, have given their workers the option of taking a voluntary buyout, presumably to stave off job losses or avoid the negative attention associated with major layoffs.
As Fast Company reported this week, some workers have even started to worry about AI being used to select employees for layoffs as companies shed jobs and reshape their workforce. In other words, it seems companies are continuing to demand more of their employees, but with less support—human or otherwise.
