Australia’s biggest bank says corporate AI is racking up bigger bills and producing ‘work slop’ Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn has identified two significant challenges in corporate AI adoption: rapidly increasing operational costs and the generation of low-quality “work slop.” Token-based pricing for AI services is scaling faster than anticipated as task complexity grows, leading to higher-than-budgeted expenses. Furthermore, insufficient quality control results in AI-generated content that degrades workflows, necessitating costly rework.

• Corporate AI adoption faces two main problems: rising costs and “work slop” (low-quality output).
• The cost of running generative AI is increasing substantially faster than budgeted due to task complexity driving up token consumption.
• “Work slop” refers to low-quality AI-generated text, code, and analysis that degrades internal workflows when used without sufficient quality control.
• Token-based pricing models are leading to significant operational expenses as task complexity increases non-linearly.
• This “work slop” problem is analogous to the “AI slop” seen with image generation tools, impacting corporate knowledge work.
• The cost-benefit ratio for AI is tightening for large institutions, leading to increased scrutiny of AI spending and pressure to demonstrate ROI.
• Falling per-token prices have been offset by rising per-task token consumption as companies move from pilot to production AI use cases.
• A “procurement-discipline phase” for AI is predicted to continue through 2026. Continue reading https://thenextweb.com/news/cba-comyn-work-slop-ai-token-costs