Originally published: The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June 2026
Tech giant Google has begun capping access to its Gemini artificial intelligence models, the clearest signal yet that the global compute squeeze is killing off the “tokenmaxxing” era and forcing the cost discipline Australian boardrooms have so far failed to impose on their own AI rollouts.
Tokens are the small chunks of work – tiny, standardised units of data – that AI models process for every task, leading to a fad in the tech world last year of “tokenmaxxing” as companies that treated token use as a proxy for productivity pushed staff to consume as much as possible.
The Elastic survey, conducted by Pureprofile and commissioned by Elastic, suggests local businesses are not yet measuring whether their AI spend delivers. Only 8 per cent of decision-makers track AI’s contribution to revenue or cost savings. Yet half of them plan to increase AI spend over the next 12 months, with 32 per cent saying they will only do so with clearer proof of value.
