[Quothling]

I think it does. I know this is through Microsoft, but they give you a month free of Cowork which is currently Opus 4.8 (or at least they did for us) and I doubt we'd ever go back. When I say "we" it's the enterprise organisation "we", but this also where this sort of spending won't stop anyone. I can't go into exact details, but if our first month had not been free, then our most expensive user would've hit around $1000, while our average (among users who've adopted it and actually use it) is around $100. Neither of those numbers would matter in a budget.

I've had the pleasure of setting up limits because Microsoft needed billing policies before our C-levels have even gotten it on their agenda. So I set up a sort of conservative $200 personal limit, but then setup a $1m shared limit pool that anyone can be moved into with management approval. I suspect our limits will be much higher than this once the C-levels make the decision on an actual company policy. I think we'll see these spending limits mainly used as guardrails to prevent accidental spending, but that there will not really be a ceiling, just some approval gates. Some managers are already requesting usage reports, but not to track spending, they want to see who uses too little AI.

This is the difference between enterprise and small companies and individuals. When you spend $500k a month keeping your toilets stacked with papertowels, toiletpaper, soap etc. then $1m a month on AI isn't going to raise any eyebrows.

[NichoPaolucci]

Your most expensive users consuming $1,000 dollars a month doesn't matter in the budget? That seems like FOMO activity or something, I feel like even big teams require proof of ROI for an investment like that (1M). BTW, the ROI of toilet paper + soap is pretty easy to prove (you GET to have employees if you provide those two things).

FWIW we are a smaller company and we had a user run through 500$ in a DAY. Had to put a stop to that. I'm hopeful that our company gets better at asking what the ROI is, what is being built, how much time is it taking, etc... It's no big deal when it's 20 / 100$ a month - but if the prices end up higher we will need to start seeing some returns other than "I feel faster".

[Quothling]

> Your most expensive users consuming $1,000 dollars a month doesn't matter in the budget?

An average employee cost around $30000 a month in my country. So it would be 3.3% in the budget for this single employee. I looked up average cost on a company our size and an IT budget of 5mil in Microsoft expences, and a max AI spending limit on 150k across the organisation would be a 5% increase of the IT budget on Microsoft services. Please note that these numbers are not ours, but averages from organisations in my area of the world.

Now I can say that the IT budget is one of the smaller budgets in non-tech enterprise. The cost of a 5% increase in the budget would not even trigger the audit margin for error in the big picture. I don't think you're necessarily wrong about the FOMO. I think that for many organisations this level of spending might trigger questions about why we aren't spending more.

This is the difference between small companies and enterprise. I once worked in a place that spent a million a year on unused Adobe licenses. The c-levels didn't even send an acknowledging reply to the email sent informing them it had been shut down.