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- Visa's AI token usage is surging, doubling to nearly 2 trillion a month from 1 trillion in February.
- While that's a far cry from Meta, it's a sign that 'tokenmaxxing' is spreading beyond Big Tech.
- Visa says it's focused on results and rewarding teams who use AI to get things done.
'Tokenmaxxing' — or the controversial practice of showing off how many AI tokens you spend — is taking off outside Silicon Valley.
Visa, the world's largest payments company, is spending 1.9 trillion tokens a month as of March — double the number it recorded in February of this year, the company told Business Insider.
Visa says it's not focused on mere output, but on actual results. It has started rewarding teams who prove they used AI to get things done faster.
"It's about the volume of impact," Visa's president of technology, Rajat Taneja, said.
It's the latest sign that large corporations are aggressively adopting AI internally, with JPMorgan tracking how heavily its employees use AI and IKEA launching an AI sidekick to help its staff brainstorm. Now, businesses are going beyond just tracking AI usage — they are also rewarding employees for it.
Unsurprisingly, the biggest token usage at Visa is taking place in its software engineering department, Taneja said. But AI is taking off in other areas, too.
For example, Visa's marketing division used AI to spin up a new ad showing skiers racing down sunbaked streets in the Amalfi Coast.
Visa's internal AI awards
Visa has started recognizing teams that use AI to supercharge their work.
One team that used Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model to ship a new API in under 6 days won such an award. Teams can choose their own prizes, such as internal company 'points' that can be used to buy things like a coffee maker, Taneja said.
Taneja said Visa employees use various chatbots, with Claude being the most popular right now — though it often swaps places with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Google's Gemini is also a popular option internally, he noted.
Visas says 89% of its employees are active AI users, and 44% are what it considers power users: that means averaging at least 25 prompts per day for 15 days a month.
How much is a trillion tokens?
The trillion-token milestone is a notable one for a company outside Silicon Valley. However, within AI-land, burning through that high a number has become routine.
Meta employees burned through 60 trillion tokens in a month, according to a recent report in The Information.
A single developer at AI coding startup Cognition also surpassed the one-trillion mark for all-time usage, according to a photo he posted of an OpenAI certificate he received for the distinction.
Still, Visa's token-touting shows that burning tokens is a flex that isn't limited to frontier tech companies anymore.
People working in different industries might want to take notice.
"This shift is once-in-a-lifetime — bigger than any technology in the past," Taneja said.