They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…
For example, everyone talks about strategy, but when you ask them what's our strategy answer is usually something like:
* let's figure out together
* industry changing is so fast, we should revisit plans every quarter
...
First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.
Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative ways of using AI), then you need to move everyone to use it. Most will just waste tokens, but someone may find a novel and useful way of using it that benefits the organization. It is difficult to achieve these without forcing people to act since their default is to follow the well-worn grooves.
So mandates like these are a top-down forcing function like a slime mold feeling out different paths to find resources.
Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI if not for leadership mandates and linking usage to performance reviews (I know, I think this is stupid, too). I can see why mandates could be useful since some folks definitely won't be inclined to use AI.
Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"
Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but also they need to quituple the cleaning budget too.
Oh and the service level has dropped, because not all clients liked being in the middle of a food fight.
However "we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain"
Absolutely, but most management are not leaders, the moment someone pushes the idea to stack rank based on token usage, it gets approved and some genuine people will be impacted.
Post-ZIRP era proved there are very few strong leaders, before that everyone was behaving like they're most amazing leader because they read some books and raised $10M
If one is a CxO who's looking out for one's job security, herd-like behavior is the safest option, due to the (near universal) structure of "performance"-based executive remuneration.