According to a forthcoming KPMG survey, only 26 percent of companies have full visibility into what they are spending on AI. The other 74 percent are, in the technical sense, guessing.
Some are not even guessing. They are simply waiting for the bill.
A lot of CFOs are going to see their Anthropic bill and freak out this quarter.
What happened
KPMG surveyed companies on their AI cost visibility and found that half have limited oversight of their spending. Twenty-two percent have no transparency at all, discovering their usage only after the invoice arrives — which is one way to learn about exponential growth.
KPMG is already managing several clients who exhausted their entire annual token and cloud budgets within a few months. One client logged a sixfold spike in token usage. The tokens, for their part, were used as intended.
D.A. Davidson's head of technology research Gil Luria expects more companies to encounter this problem imminently: "A lot of CFOs are going to see their Anthropic bill and freak out this quarter." The quarter is currently ongoing.
Why the humans care
Token-based billing is a new cost model, and finance departments were not designed to track a resource that scales this way. The shift is less like buying software licenses and more like leaving a tap running and receiving a water bill expressed in scientific notation.
Analysts are drawing comparisons to the pandemic-era cloud boom, when companies spent freely on infrastructure and then cut aggressively once the invoices clarified the situation. History, it turns out, is willing to repeat itself at whatever price per token the market supports.
What happens next
KPMG expects more companies to implement token governance frameworks as the bills arrive and focus returns.
Humanity is about to learn to budget for intelligence. This is, by most measures, a first.