Companies may soon give employees AI data caps, like a spending limit

As corporate AI bills climb, Instagram head Adam Mosseri believes companies will soon start treating employee AI usage the way they treat any other limited resource, with strict caps.

Speaking on a recent episode of ‘Lenny’s Podcast,’ Mosseri said companies will eventually need to place strict data caps on workers, distributed based on an employee’s proven ability to deliver a positive return on the investment. The comment came as he described how his own division reined in its AI budget by cutting wasteful, early-stage experiments. ‘We’ve managed to get the costs reined in a little bit by shutting down the silly things that we were doing,’ he told host Lenny Rachitsky, according to Business Insider.

Mosseri now views AI tokens, the basic units of data AI models process, as a standard corporate resource that must be budgeted alongside GPUs, server storage, RAM and payroll. That marks a shift from the early AI boom, when companies including Meta reportedly ran internal leaderboards tracking massive token consumption, a trend known as ‘tokenmaxxing’ that Mosseri now calls ‘a terrible idea.’

He predicted that within a year or two, ‘the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary or their cost of employment.’ The warning echoes concerns raised elsewhere in the industry, including by Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, who has questioned whether his company’s massive AI spending is producing meaningful business results.

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