If your employer recently limited how much artificial intelligence you can use, the reason probably was not you. It was the slide decks.
Leaked audio from inside the consulting firm Accenture, reported by 404 Media, caught an executive making a point that has caught a lot of companies off guard. The heaviest AI spending was not coming from the engineers. It was coming from everyone else — people feeding long documents into AI and asking it to turn them into presentations.
AI is billed by the token, roughly three-quarters of a word, counted going in and coming out. Asking a question costs pennies. Handing over a document costs more. Handing over 50 documents and asking for a finished deck costs a great deal more, because the machine reads all of it, then reads it again at every step of the job.
None of that shows up on the screen. The box looks the same either way.
So companies began setting limits. According to the Financial Times, Uber, Walmart, Amazon, Meta and Cisco have all capped internal AI use or steered employees toward cheaper tools. Walmart’s global technology chief, Suresh Kumar, explained the reasoning plainly: running the same request through an AI agent costs far more than a routine search, and limits nudge people to stop asking twice.
The older version of this problem was the employee who parked ten years of vacation photos on the company server. Nobody thought of it as taking anything. It simply never occurred to them that the space cost money. The meter is a good deal bigger now.
Briefs and quick reads selected and edited by The Smart Reader’s editorial team.
