The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI
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7th August 2026 - Link Blog
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI (via) There's a fun anecdote from Accenture (apparently via leaked meeting audio recordings) in this 404 Media piece from June 24th:
“We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors [...] you were talking about,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, said [...]
Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into markdown: is that right?”
That’s when Kwak says that’s what Accenture’s own data shows.
Maybe if Accenture figure out that PDFs are a terrible medium for communicating information they'll be able to push that message out to the rest of the business world too!
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This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 7th August 2026.
pdf 41
markdown 34
ai 2,172
generative-ai 1,923
llms 1,890
ai-misuse 60
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