Enterprise AI Spending Hits $177 Billion as Employers Impose Token Caps

Enterprise AI deployment spending reached $177 billion by September, up from $33 billion in all of 2025, according to a Menlo Ventures study. That fivefold jump is now forcing employers — Goldman Sachs, Cisco and JPMorgan among them — to rethink which workers get access to which AI tools, and at what cost.

The shift touches people-process decisions directly: budget setting, usage tracking, role-based access restrictions and, in some cases, the end of open-ended AI allowances that HR and IT teams once used to drive adoption. The goal is not necessarily cutting spend, but making sure companies get measurable value from it.

What changed at the biggest employers?

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said this month that the bank is rapidly expanding the range of AI tools for its 45,000 employees, but not every worker needs top-tier models. "We need frontier models for certain things, particularly cyber," he told Bloomberg TV. "There are a lot of things where we don't need the frontier" to help employees be productive.

JPMorgan imposed a monthly $2,000 cap in September on some engineers' use of Anthropic's Claude Code, Business Insider previously reported. A spokesperson said the bank was tying costs to productivity, quality, risk reduction and business impact.

Cisco took a staged approach. Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel compared the company's early policy to learning to ride a bicycle: coding teams got months of unlimited tokens to build fluency before worrying about efficiency, he said on the CXOTalk podcast. Now managers across his 32,000-person team will receive token budgets.

Why are bills ballooning?

Only 13% of roughly 2,000 tech executives polled by Gartner from May through July said their organizations had gained significant value from AI — a signal that heavy spending has not reliably translated into returns.

Workers have little incentive to curb usage, said Alex Sobol, cofounder of the Millennium Alliance, an invite-only C-suite community. Without limits, "they're going to use it in every possible way they can," he said.

Security adds another reason for tighter governance. A 2025 KPMG survey of more than 1,000 US workers found 44% used AI at work without authorization or in inappropriate ways, and 46% had uploaded sensitive company information or intellectual property to public AI platforms.

From token bragging to token budgeting

The turn toward oversight reverses months of employers celebrating heavy AI consumption. Visa said it doubled monthly token use from 1 trillion in February to nearly 2 trillion in March, awarding prizes to its heaviest AI users. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in March the company aimed to spend up to $2 billion annually on tokens for engineers — and would be "deeply alarmed" if a $500,000 engineer used less than $250,000 worth.

Dashboards drove visibility. Disney's data showed its biggest AI users making hundreds of requests per day and consuming tens of millions of tokens, Business Insider reported in April. KPMG US launched a dashboard in May for its advisory unit's roughly 10,000 workers to encourage "frequent and sophisticated" use — then discontinued monitoring once AI became part of everyday work, a spokesperson said.

What does this mean for HR and IT leaders?

Rippling, a workforce-management software startup, set monthly caps in August after projecting token spending could reach 40% of its R&D headcount budget. Limits and more efficient model routing cut the projection to between 10% and 15%, while token use stayed near its previous peak.

"The point isn't to cut AI cost," Chief Product Officer Matt MacInnis said in a statement. "We're actually fine with cost growth, provided it's productive."

Lari Hämäläinen, a senior partner in McKinsey & Company's technology, media and telecommunications practice, said AI use is "really picking up" and employers need guardrails. As spending scales, expect more firms to move from blanket access toward role-based tool assignment, usage dashboards and productivity-linked budgets — with HR central to deciding who gets what.