An employee at Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions spent $28,000 on artificial intelligence tools in just 28 days, according to internal company reports, prompting management, which previously encouraged spending tokens on programming, to significantly tighten controls on AI spending.
An employee at Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions spent $28,000 on artificial intelligence tools in just 28 days, according to internal company reports, prompting management, which previously encouraged spending tokens on programming, to significantly tighten controls on AI spending.
This is reported by Futurism with reference to the internal table of payments to Microsoft employees, which was first published by Business Insider .
In 2026, Microsoft added a new column to its internal accounting system: «AI spending in dollars per month.» According to data from about 350 employees who disclosed their figures, the median spending across the company is about $300 over a 28-day period. However, individual employees spent significantly more: some exceeded the $10,000 mark, and the record holder was an employee with a bill of $28,000.
Due to such cases of «tokenmaxing» (excessive and uncontrolled use of tokens), Microsoft management began to take strict measures. Executive Vice President of CoreAI Jay Pareek sent an internal memo to employees urging them to control costs.
«Tokenmaxing is not what we are aiming for. I want all of us to focus on maximizing outcomes that make a real difference for our customers and our business. We are updating our internal guidelines and managing token spending with the same discipline we apply to all other critical resources,» said Parikh.
To significantly reduce costs, Microsoft will transition employees to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model as the standard for internal use. It is designed to perform tasks more efficiently and with less token consumption.
Now, large IT companies are starting to count the costs after the first wave of enthusiasm for AI. Amazon previously faced a similar problem: the company maintained internal rankings of the extent of AI use among employees, but was forced to cancel them due to absurd bills for computing infrastructure.
Earlier, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said that governments should consider taxing AI tools and robots to avoid stagnation in the labor market and a reduction in tax revenues to state budgets.
