Episode
Why Big Tech is tokenmaxxed out
- Podcast
- Daybreak
- Published
- Jun 4, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 691
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/64edc93c
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Summary
Amazon built a leaderboard to track how much AI its engineers were using. Employees gamed it. Costs exploded. Last week, the leaderboard was gone. Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget in four months — after telling staff to use AI "as much as possible." Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licences six months after rolling them out. Three companies, the same couple months, the same lesson: that measuring AI adoption is turning out to be a very different thing from measuring AI productivity. Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.