Markets
The Token Line Item Nobody's Finance System Can Read: Uber Burned Its 2026 AI Budget in Four Months
Enterprise finance stacks have no mechanism to track, allocate or control token-metered AI consumption — and the numbers have outrun the tooling. Uber exhausted its full-year 2026 AI budget in four months and now caps spend at $1,500 per employee per tool; average enterprise reasoning-token consumption rose roughly 320x over 12 months; OpenRouter is moving 25 trillion tokens per week, a five-fold jump in six months. Per-token output cost fell from $60/M in 2023 to ~$0.40, which is exactly why total spend exploded. Metronome, Lago and Ramp are the vendors positioned on the metering gap.
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