Are Humans Actually Cheaper Than AI? Why Digital Workers Are Blowing Up 2026 Budgets
As token bills soar and IT budgets balloon, businesses are realizing that replacing workers with AI may not be the cost-cutting move they anticipated.
This article was originally published on Inc.com.
The promise of AI replacing human workers was supposed to save companies money. For many, it’s doing the opposite.
Deploying AI agents to replace workers without a clear cost strategy can be a costly miscalculation and with worldwide IT spending expected to reach over 6 trillion in 2026, up 13.5 percent from 2025, the stakes have never been higher.
“As AI workloads scale, data center investment is ramping rapidly, which in turn is driving increased demand for high‑performance compute,” Gartner’s distinguished vice president analyst John-David Lovelock said. “This dynamic is creating meaningful growth opportunities for companies delivering AI‑optimized processors, accelerators, and enabling technologies.”
According to The Information, Uber’s chief technology officer reportedly exhausted his entire 2026 AI budget ahead of schedule due to token costs.
“I’m back to the drawing board because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already,” Praveen Neppalli Naga said.
From answering customer inquiries to debugging intricate software systems, AI can handle a wide range of workplace tasks, with one of its most common applications being the generation of large volumes of code at a pace no human could match. All of these tasks cost tokens, and the bill can add up fast.
“If you have some continuously running agents, you’ll do 700 million tokens a week from a single full-time agent,” Ege Erdil, a co-founder of Mechanize–an AI startup—who estimated his own token consumption at between one billion and 10 billion a week—told The New York Times. “It doesn’t really take that much.”
The dynamic presents a clear opportunity for AI providers. One OpenAI investor told Axios that concerns over token costs could work in their favor, citing a belief that Codex uses tokens more efficiently than Anthropic’s Claude Code. Anthropic, meanwhile, has responded to demand by raising its pricing.
Some tech workers have turned their token usage into a competition, spending millions of tokens in a single day—a practice that has come to be known as tokenmaxxing—with some users racking up bills of $150,000 a month.
“I probably spend more than my salary on Claude,” a software engineer in Stockholm told The Times. For many employers, that means footing the bill for both the AI and the worker it was meant to replace.
Whether through demonstrable productivity gains or metrics that show a clear return on investment, even the most well-resourced companies will face pressure to prove the value of their AI spending over time.
“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, said.
As the price of AI continues to climb, companies are being forced to rethink what they’re actually paying for. Vice president of digital labor strategy at Asymbl—a workforce orchestration company—Brad Owens framed it this way: “The tone is shifting a bit more into what is the true value of a worker, human or digital?”
