Branden Jenkins was at dinner when he glanced at his phone and saw a charge that would give any manager pause: $1,000. The CEO of Atlanta-based software company Maxio had been using an AI agent to write and debug code remotely over the weekend, and his account was configured to automatically replenish its token balance in $1,000 increments. While he was away from his desk, the agent kept working\u2014and kept spending.<\/p>\n
“A thousand is not that much, I would say, but for one weekend, it’s pretty annoying,” Jenkins told Fortune. His AI agent, he recalled, was “cooking away” while he was out. “Wow, I just got here quickly.”<\/p>\n
The unexpected charge was frustrating, but Jenkins said it was far from his biggest concern. The real challenge, he argued, is what AI adoption is doing to the people inside his company\u2014employees who fear they are falling behind the technology, or even behind their own colleagues.<\/p>\n
As a self-described technical CEO, Jenkins builds his own AI agents and automations and can code from his phone using Claude. Unlike many employees at Maxio, he does not face the same internal spending limits. “I don’t have governors where a lot of my staff hits limits, and they have to ask for approval,” he said. “So I started leaning in and going, ‘What does this look like?'”<\/p>\n
What he found was that a significant portion of AI spending came from agents drifting away from their original tasks. “A lot of times it’s the agent’s own mistakes that’s burning your money,” Jenkins said. “You kind of find yourself just chatting, and [things] getting away from you.” Users can encourage an AI system to keep exploring an idea, only to realize later that it has taken the task somewhere entirely unintended.<\/p>\n
The episode prompted Jenkins to experiment with ways to control token consumption. He assigned simpler jobs to lighter models such as Claude’s Haiku while reserving more expensive reasoning models for complex work. He also tested third-party tools designed to shorten AI responses. One approach he dubbed “Caveman mode” forces an AI assistant to provide brief answers, which Jenkins estimated could cut token use by roughly 70 percent.<\/p>\n
“These are nerdy things,” he said. “Do we need sales leaders and service leaders and marketers finding this stuff?”<\/p>\n
The Three Bigger Problems<\/p>\n
Jenkins said the token overspend, while inconvenient, is a distraction from the more pressing issues Maxio faces as it expands its use of AI: inefficiency, inequality, and insecurity.<\/p>\n
The insecurity piece surfaced when Jenkins began building AI tools for parts of the organization himself. Some employees felt threatened by how quickly he was adopting the technology. One employee told him: “This put me on edge. I should be coming to you with these things. I’ve got to catch up. I feel so behind.”<\/p>\n
Jenkins said employees are increasingly asking themselves: “Am I doing my job? Am I keeping up? Will this replace my job? Will this replace my team members?” He noted that token overspend “is really not the problem, but it could easily be the excuse” for deeper anxieties about job security and relevance.<\/p>\n
Inequality emerged as a separate concern. Maxio rolled out ChatGPT broadly across the company but gave Claude access to only about 50 employees, largely in sales and marketing. That triggered pushback from teams left out. “People were like, wait a minute, why don’t I have Claude? Why do they get that and we don’t get that?” Jenkins said. “That’s an inequality.”<\/p>\n
Rethinking the Org Chart<\/p>\n
Maxio has responded by incorporating AI agents into its organizational planning. Jenkins said executives have mapped departments by considering both human employees and the AI agents those employees manage. The company has also increased DevOps oversight of internally developed “vibe-coded” tools, which cannot depend on a single employee for maintenance. “It can’t just be with Tim that vibe-coded it on the weekend,” Jenkins said, citing security, scalability, and continuity concerns.<\/p>\n
The shift is already affecting hiring. Jenkins does not advocate cutting large numbers of employees because of AI, but he said Maxio should not expect its workforce to expand at the same pace as revenue. “I’m not arguing that we want to reduce a whole bunch of headcount because of AI, but we should not be growing the headcount at the same rate that we were before,” he said. “That’s a big change in our business, and it’s all attributed to AI.”<\/p>\n
Despite the challenges, Jenkins remains bullish on AI adoption. “Right now there’s so much good that outweighs a lot of this,” he said. And as AI agents become more autonomous, the occasional $1,000 weekend bill may simply become a cost of doing business. “It probably will be a thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Branden Jenkins was at dinner when he glanced at his phone and saw a charge that would give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,53,7537,72680,580,182,25433,72966],"class_list":["post-148971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-branden-jenkins","tag-chatgpt","tag-claude","tag-fortune","tag-maxio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}