Eye-watering amount Microsoft employees are spending on AI revealed in new report
Microsoft employees are spending anywhere between a few dollars to tens of thousands every single month on AI tools, with workers voluntarily sharing the eye-watering figures amid seemingly 'unsustainable' spending.
It's all good and well the companies behind AI claiming how important it will be, but actually getting people to use it is another question — especially in workplaces where habits are often set in place.
That's why giant companies like Microsoft have introduced incentives for people to take advantage of AI tools, yet that encouragement has now backfired as spending soared through the roof.
Part of this is to do with concerning practices like 'tokenmaxxing', where employees deliberately use AI for useless tasks to climb internal leaderboards tracking token consumption, but in general AI is simply getting more expensive by the month, and many companies are struggling to keep up.
How much Microsoft employees are spending on AI
As reported by Business Insider, Microsoft has introduced new internal spreadsheets which allow staff to voluntarily report any raises, bonuses, and stock awards that they obtain throughout their tenure, with a new added section designed to help track AI spending too.
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Workers are very much still encouraged to use AI whenever necessary, yet there appears to be a desire for transparency around spending in order to cut down unsustainable costs, and this spreadsheet potentially helps direct the company's focus.
Measuring AI spending across the last 28 days, the spreadsheet collated the money given to AI by around 350 employees at Microsoft, with the median usage cost being approximately $300.
That's a far cry from the maximum though, with the leading employee spending a jaw-dropping $28,000 across just a single month on AI tokens for their job in the company's Customer and Partner Solutions organization.
Unsurprisingly the area with the highest median spend across the last 28 days is Microsoft's CoreAI team with $975, followed by Security ($526), Microsoft AI ($490), and Cloud + AI ($325) employees in rounding out the top four.
Most of the departments reached individual maximum spend numbers above $10,000, although all equally had low minimum individual spends with the highest being just $58 for the Security team.
This remains an incredibly small data set for a company with more than 223,000 employees, but it represents a costly concern for Microsoft as a whole where the spending might not match up with the results that are produced.
Is tokenmaxxing a problem for Microsoft?
Microsoft's encouragement of AI use has caused a big problem for the company, as a new memo from leadership has called out 'tokenmaxxing' efforts from workers.
Jay Parikh, an executive vice president at Microsoft, outlined in an email to employees: "As we accelerate our use of GitHub Copilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens.
"Tokenmaxxing is not what we're optimizing for. I want all of us to be focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business," he continued.
Part of these measures include the management of token spending business-wide and updating the internal guidance surrounding AI usage, deeming the rapidly evolving tech to be a 'critical resource' that shouldn't and can't be used for everything.
On top of this, Microsoft has even ditched its own AI model, Copilot, in favor of ChatGPT as OpenAI's tech allows employees to "get greater value from our token investment."