A common trend emerging in larger enterprises is token budgeting as a major topic. As agents can do more and more long running tasks, and thus take vastly more compute, allocation of tokens across teams becomes a very real thing in the enterprise.
Companies spend a meaningful amount of time deciding how much to spend on talent, marketing campaigns, events, laptop setups, and even the cost of lunches. Tokens will be no different.
Tokens will similarly need to be excruciatingly well-managed because you’ll need to ensure you don’t blow up your budget, and you’ll need to ensure that the tokens are flowing to the highest and most useful parts of work. You don’t want to find out you burned your monthly budget on something relatively low value and then be blocked on the much higher value task later.
Doing this at large company scale is extremely hard as you have layers of abstraction on data and visibility into the digital work being done by agents in any central way. This is going to mean that agentic spend will increasingly will expand beyond the confines of the IT budget, and end up in organizational budgets like other expenses.
Ultimately team and org leaders will have to be given budgets for this, but even they don’t have adequate visibility and controls in most cases. We’ll need all new software just to solve this problem, and it’s probably an opportunity for startups in its own right.
Going to be an all new era of enterprise resource allocation, especially while we compute constrained.