Companies With Goals Of AI Tokenmaxxing Are Foolishly Inspiring Employees To Waste Costly AI Resources

InnovationAICompanies With Goals Of AI Tokenmaxxing Are Foolishly Inspiring Employees To Waste Costly AI ResourcesByLance Eliot,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a world-renowned AI scientist and consultant.Follow AuthorMay 19, 2026, 03:15am EDTSome companies are encouraging AI tokenmaxxing, but this is likely to backfire.gettyIn today’s column, I examine a new trend about generative AI and large language models (LLMs) that seems to be causing quite a bit of eyerolling. It has to do with the use of AI tokens, which, at a 30,000-foot level, generally refers to how many words you use in your prompts and AI-generated responses (I’ll explain more momentarily).Here’s the backstory. Many companies are encouraging their employees to use AI. One way to do so is to tell the employees that the company is going to keep track of the number of tokens that each employee consumes (i.e., essentially the number of words in prompts and responses). The more tokens you consume, the more AI that you are seemingly utilizing. Firms have even set up internal leaderboards that showcase for each employee the number of tokens they have used per day, per week, per month, and so on. Employees are proud to get their name at the top of the leaderboard. By using AI as much as possible, their token count gets higher and higher. Some companies give prizes, monetary bonuses, a pat on the back, and other heralded rewards for the highest token counts.The rub is this. Just because you consume a lot of tokens doesn’t mean you are productively using AI. You can sneakily tell AI to do dumb and useless things; meanwhile, your token counts keep mounting. Employees realize that companies are creating a stupid game of sorts. If your employer wants you to use up tokens, by gosh, you’ll readily find a means to do so. Crank out all sorts of AI slop that has no value and no significance to the company. The gist is that you can claim to heroicall...