Survey Surfaces Rising Tokenomics Cost Challenges For AI
Techstrong.ai, Monday, April 6th, 2026
A survey of 515 business and IT leaders in the U.S. spanning enterprises with more than $500 million in annual revenue finds just under a third (30%) are already seeing their organizations consume more than 10 billion tokens per month when accessing artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications.
Conducted by Deloitte, a total of 61% expect their organizations to consume more than 10 billion tokens per month by 2028.
That level of consumption makes it clear most organizations are going to need to adopt best practices for optimizing prompts to reduce costs, says Chris Thomas, U.S hybrid cloud infrastructure leader for Deloitte. 'There is going to be a lot more focus on tokenomics,' he adds.
Similar to the best FinOps practices that many organizations have adopted to control cloud costs, the need to ensure prompts are efficiently consuming infrastructure resources is becoming critical, notes Thomas. In fact, a full 86% of respondents expect AI infrastructure budgets to increase in the next three years, with allocations expected to, on average, more than triple, the survey finds.