Simon Willison August 8, 2026 2 min signal 2026-08-08

The Tokenpocalypse is here: companies are scrambling to stop spending so much on AI

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Sponsored by: Dynatrace — When agents enter the SDLC, observability becomes the enabler to move from code generation to scalable engineering. Read the blog for a framework to get started

7th August 2026 - Link Blog

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI (via) There's a fun anecdote from Accenture (apparently via leaked meeting audio recordings) in this 404 Media piece from June 24th:

“We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors [...] you were talking about,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, said [...]

Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into markdown: is that right?”

That’s when Kwak says that’s what Accenture’s own data shows.

Maybe if Accenture figure out that PDFs are a terrible medium for communicating information they'll be able to push that message out to the rest of the business world too!

Posted 7th August 2026 at 4:18 pm

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Recent articles