(00:00:00) AI Cost Paradox: Token Prices Fall, Enterprise Bills Surge | Ep. 1
(00:00:38) Uber's Budget Wall
(00:01:16) Goldman's 24x Token Forecast
(00:01:44) Anthropic's $900B Valuation
(00:02:37) Kore.ai Artemis Governance Launch
(00:03:06) Datadog Crosses $1B Quarterly
(00:03:32) What to Watch Next

Token prices are falling. Enterprise AI bills are rising. That contradiction is now the defining tension in business AI — and today's episode unpacks exactly why it's happening and what it means for your organisation.

Microsoft has been scaling back internal Claude Code usage and shifting engineers to GitHub Copilot's command-line tools after AI adoption blew through its budget in months. Uber's CTO confirmed compute costs have outrun employee salaries — the company burned through its entire annual AI tooling budget by May. Goldman Sachs puts a number on where this is heading: a 24x rise in token consumption by 2030, reaching 120 quadrillion tokens per month. CFOs benchmarking on per-token price drops are measuring the wrong variable.

Meanwhile, Anthropic closed a $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion valuation — overtaking OpenAI as the world's most valuable private AI company. Claude Code crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue in just six months, the fastest enterprise software ramp on record. An IPO is now targeted for October.

Also in this episode: Kore.ai launches Artemis on Azure, an AI governance platform that compiles agent logic into auditable executables — critical for banking and healthcare. Datadog crosses $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, fuelled by demand for AI cost observability tools. And New Zealand moves to cut 8,000 public sector jobs with AI — without a regulatory framework in place.

The two metrics to watch: aggregate enterprise AI spend versus forecast savings, and whether Anthropic's revenue trajectory holds through the IPO window.

This episode includes AI-generated content.