How Companies Are Becoming AI Token Efficient

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, how companies are becoming AI token efficient.
Before that in the headlines, ChatGPT becomes the fastest app to ever reach a billion users.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, Assembly, and OutSystems. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you want to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at aidailybrief.ai.
And one more quick thing, if you are looking to get up to speed fast on AI, you might have heard that episode that I did with Newfar about a week ago on the four AI hires executives need to make right now. Newfar is now offering a four-week executive AI sprint called Executive Catch-Up. There are just a couple days left to register. You can find out about it at aiexecutivecatchup.com. And there will also be a link in the show notes.
We kick off today with another big check mark from my 2026 predictions. Although honestly, I have to say this was the most gimme of all those predictions. ChatGPT has officially hit a billion monthly active users. That is, according to new estimates from data analytics firm Sensor Tower, who looked at monthly active users in May. Now, the milestone has been a long time coming, and there's actually been a fair bit of digital ink spilt over it. Specifically, back in April, the Wall Street Journal made a very big deal of OpenAI's failure to hit this milestone as their end of year target for 2025
That article also highlighted a failure to reach monthly revenue targets, and was part of a fairly negative news cycle for OpenAI.
Ostensibly, the narrative was that ChatGPT had hit a growth plateau as Claude and Gemini gathered steam, but in reality, and as listeners of this show well knew even back then, for those paying close attention, the narrative already seemed out of date by the time it was published. OpenAI did have a rough end of the year as Claude Cote took the world by storm. Those issues led to Sam Altman calling a code red in December, and Fiji Simo declaring the end of side quests in March. By April when the article was published, however, OpenAI was already well into the middle of their resurgence. Codex was seeing a spike in popularity, and the release of GPT-55 had, for many folks, the first time in a long time that OpenAI's state-of-the-art model was in the vibes lead compared to its anthropic pair. And you have to think that for most people, now that the milestone has been reached, the five-month delay on reaching the billion-user milestone wasn't all that big a deal. ChatGPT is still by far the fastest app to reach a billion users, taking just three and a half years. That's better than TikTok's five years, and significantly faster than the eight years it took YouTube and Instagram.
Around 12% of the global population is now logging into ChatGPT every month, making OpenAI's flagship product dramatically different to everything else in the industry.
Now, Sensor Tower's report did capture how dramatic the rise of Clot has been. The company has seen 640% user growth over the past year, but that still puts them only at 56 million monthly active users. In other words, they're still around just 5% of the consumer use of ChatGPT. But that also shows just how valuable the business audience is, given that Anthropic are officially ahead of OpenAI in the revenue race right now. It is worth noting that Sensor Tower also found that business users aren't making a hard switch from ChatGPT to Claude despite Claude's rising numbers. ChatGPT users who installed Claude in the first quarter ended up using ChatGPT 5% less. That's not a nothing number, but it certainly suggests that people are adding Claude as a second chatbot rather than as a direct replacement.
Now why do all these numbers matter? Well frankly, it's because they're going to be thrown around a lot in the horse race narrative when it comes to Wall Street IPOs. But for anyone who's not invested in one to the exclusion of the other, it just shows how incredibly dynamic and fast growing both of these companies are. Speaking of big AI milestones, bots and agents have overtaken humans in web traffic for the first time. According to CloudFlare's data, bots now represent 57.5% of web traffic that flows through their service. Now a big chunk of this is of course AI data scrapers, but the growth in web agents has also been dramatic over the past year. This is creating some challenges. The rise in bot-based browsing means a drop off in website ad revenue, and there's also been a sharp rise in malicious automated traffic. CloudFlare now classifies 37% as bad bots that ignore web crawling rules in robots.txt. And yet, this was an entirely inevitable outcome. In an interview at South by Southwest back in March, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince predicted that bots would overtake human web traffic by next year. He said, For a long time, the internet was about 20% bot traffic. Google was the largest, but you had a whole bunch of other things, including hackers and spammers and all kinds of miscreants that were online. With the rise of GenAI, it's just an insatiable need for data. We're seeing a rise where we suspect that in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online and will continue to grow after that.