Companies including Amazon, Disney and Meta are tracking workers' AI tool usage, but staff are inflating scores through unnecessary tasks as token costs blow through budgets

At Meta, employees competed on a leaderboard measuring the 250 most prolific workers by tokens spent (a unit of AI usage). Disney deployed a similar 'AI adoption dashboard,' while Amazon pushed AI adoption so aggressively that some staff reportedly inflated scores by getting AI systems to perform unnecessary tasks.

Uber's chief technology officer revealed in April that the ride-hailing company burned through its entire annual AI budget in less than four months as employees swarmed to programming tool Claude Code. The company's chief operating officer later acknowledged the returns had been uncertain, stating it was 'very hard to draw a line' between AI spending and actual increases in consumer-facing features.

Large companies pay for AI usage by the token (typically a word or fragment of a word). Today's most advanced AI models cost $5 (£4) for one million tokens, but engineers are constructing swarms of agents to analyze data through evenings, nights and weekends, managed by other AI agents, allowing costs to reach billions.