What does AI cost organizations?

“On R&D, the majority of our internal AI spend is allocated here, so you've seen a modest uptick in year-over-year growth.”

Jeff HoffmeisterChief Financial Officer · Executive, Shopify

“We were able to hold gross margins at a relatively consistent level quarter over quarter while Sidekiq usage scaled, which reflects some cost efficiencies in support”

Jeff HoffmeisterChief Financial Officer · Executive, Shopify

“Inside the business, we also use AI, and that is more closer to the $10 million range internally.”

DuolingoPublished by the organization itself (earnings call), no named author

“We decreased spending on external marketing suppliers, such as translation, production, CRM and social agencies, by $7 million in the first quarter of 2024 (as compared to the first quarter of 2023) and we attribute 37% of this decrease to the use of AI”

KlarnaPublished by the organization itself (regulatory filing), no named author

“The planning agent is responsible for the actual thinking, so it should run on your most powerful model. I initially used Fable for this purpose when it was available, as it excels in UI/UX design. When Fable was no longer accessible, I switched to Opus. Since the planner writes the specifications, the implementation can be handled by a more cost-effective and faster model like Sonnet.”

Noah BlauensteinerAuthor, Xebia articles · Practitioner, Xebia

“Running several agents in parallel burns tokens quickly, so set budgets and keep an eye on spending from day one.”

Noah BlauensteinerAuthor, Xebia articles · Practitioner, Xebia

“You could figure out which ones took less tool calls, … which one made less errors, which one produced the correct outcome, and deterministically know what's going on. The point is you can start building data-driven systems without ever writing a single line of code. … in order to build a programming language, it wouldn't have taken eight people. It wouldn't have taken less than two years. It would have taken hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of man hours, and then you would still have a broken system. And today, we can just spend billions of tokens and make it work, and we can make it stable.”

Vaibhav GuptaCo-founder and Chief Executive · Executive, Boundary (BoundaryML)

“Before I trusted this workflow, I back tested the scoring against months of clean up history. Then I ran it live. Seven for seven PRs with green CI. Now it runs daily on my laptop and hands work back for me to review. … $1.26 a pull request. A backlog of around 520 flags a year runs for under $700. If you had engineers working on this by hand, at least $26,000 that you're looking at.”

Andrew OrobatorSenior Software Engineer · Practitioner, Reddit

“we saw that against like a very naive implementation, our costs were down by 60%, and our quality and our accuracy was up by around 70%.”

Ameya KetkarSpeaker, AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 (job title not stated) · Practitioner, Uber

“we have a security agent that processes over 7 billion tokens per day on Kimi. That would cost an estimated $2.4M per year on a mid-tier proprietary model. But on Workers AI, it’s 77% cheaper.”

CloudflarePublished by the organization itself (post), no named author

“supported by AI-enabled productivity gains and continued cost discipline.”

KlarnaPublished by the organization itself (regulatory filing), no named author

“our customer support related cost per booking declined approximately 16% year-over-year”

AirbnbPublished by the organization itself (regulatory filing), no named author

“it's not about how many tokens you use, it's about the throughput of your product and the quality of your product designs and how much you're shipping.”

Brian CheskyCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Airbnb

“it obviously does assume a material increase in terms of the AI spend over the course of the year”

Ellie MertzChief Financial Officer · Executive, Airbnb

“Customer support is a clear area where we should be able to up the quality of our customer support interactions as well as reduce the cost of our effort there.”

Balaji KrishnamurthyChief Financial Officer · Executive, Uber

“This is supported by AI-enabled productivity gains and continued cost discipline across the business.”

KlarnaPublished by the organization itself (regulatory filing), no named author

“The AI agent helped contribute to a 40% reduction in the HR team’s operational costs over the past four years.”

IBMPublished by the organization itself (post), no named author