OpenAI Reveals CEO Dilemma: Who Gets AI Tokens?

**Bob Evans** (0:00)
Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. We got an emerging dilemma here for CEOs in the early days of the AI revolution. And a new solution from OpenAI has brought that to light. And the dilemma is this, when everybody wants AI tokens, as many as they can get, as quickly as they can get them, but AI tokens are in a limited supply, who gets them? Who decides that? How do companies measure that? That's the dilemma for CEOs.
And this came to light. We've all heard the story a few weeks ago, but you know, some company in fact charged $500 million by Anthropic because of runaway usage. So OpenAI, I'm sure, has run into some cases from its own customers who have said, hey, can you help us monitor, measure the impact of what people are doing with these tokens and ensure that while we're giving people enough, that we stay within our budget. So OpenAI has come out with a new tool.
I was intrigued by this idea and was reading it. And then in light of the fact that every company now, we hear all this talk about it's going to be the AI future, AI revolution, AI culture, AI business, AI economy. You can understand that every single employee wants to say, hey, I want to get my share, I want to do my part to help the company become AI native. So I got to have the tools to do that. That's AI token. So everybody wants them.
Who determines who gets them? So there's new solution from OpenAI is aimed at AI administrators, so they can sort of turn them on and off, see who's using what, which one's aligned with business impact, more over here, less over here. As a tool, that's all great, but who sets on high the policies that those AI admins then can use as their guide for what's going on here? The current state of reality in the marketplace is the technology is outpacing a lot of corporate cultures. Perhaps there are some CEOs who have sat down with their executive teams and very rigorously hammered this out. A very clear, transparent policy that everybody in the company can look at and say, okay, I might not like this outcome, but I understand it. We're being driven here by what's best for the company, the biggest business outcome, aligning token usage with the company's priorities. The current state of the market, though, is one where I don't see that happening too many places.
And the default position is, well, these AI administrators will handle that. Right? As they get requests come in, they'll make the decision about it. And in a detailed article that I've got later this morning on cloudwars.com, I offer some excerpts from the OpenAI announcement about this new product. Again, the descriptions of the product make perfect sense, right? I think it meets a big need. The problem sits on top of that solution. Who sets the policies that the AI admins will then follow? Because it would just be madness for the AI admins to be the ones who have to determine. You got salespeople over here screaming, I need more, I need more. But product development says, we got the biggest new rollout in history. We need more over here. Marketing says, forget that. If we can sell them and build up demand, why build it? And then you've got somebody else, distribution, every part of the company saying, I need more, I need more. Who sets the guidelines for how that is determined? And I think currently the problem is that enormous burden is resting on the shoulders of AI administrators who are just not equipped from a corporate sense of responsibility or even most important, the wherewithal to see across the company, where do we want to put these things? And so it simply can't be left to that.
So I think for CEOs, we got this idea that the AI clock is ticking, not only to set a high level strategy for what our goals are, how are we going to use AI? How are we going to build a culture that allows us to be very successful here in the AI revolution, in the AI economy? And this is going to be one of the determinants of it. And I would love to see how many CEOs are really stepping up and addressing this, because I think you couldn't expect a payroll administrator to be the person who sets who's going to get raises, who's going to get bonuses. Yet right now, there is this gap with AI admins and the tokens that everybody wants, and there's no clear indicator. So great tool from OpenAI, but I think there's got to be a lot of education done around up at the top level for customers. And I'm sure that Google Cloud and Anthropic, Oracle, Microsoft, others, are running into a similar sort of thing here. And that will extend to every company in the Cloud Wars Top 10, as AI tokens begin to be recognized as incredibly valuable. I think, who knows, some people in their comp packages might say for next year, instead of a cash bonus based on money, I'd like to have half in AI tokens, half in cash. Maybe that's crazy, maybe it isn't. We will see wild times here in the Cloud Wars, and the AI revolution. Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.