More tokens burned was never proof of value - and companies just learned it the hard way
Uprovd Take The collapse of 'tokenmaxxing' confirms Uprovd's core claim: usage is a vanity metric, and only measured outcomes show whether AI actually paid off.
Read the original at FortuneFor a while, heavy token consumption got treated as a sign that AI was working - the more an organization fed its models, the more transformed it supposedly was. Fortune reports that idea has fallen apart, because piling on usage never translated into the returns leaders were promised.
It’s the usage-versus-outcome confusion in its purest form. A soaring token bill measures appetite, not achievement, and mistaking one for the other is how companies end up spending hard and proving nothing.
Uprovd starts from the opposite premise - that value has to be tied to outcomes a CFO can defend, not to how busy the models happen to look.
This is Uprovd's analysis of third-party reporting. Original article linked above.