Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push the use of AI as much as possible. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly depleted its annual AI budget in a matter of months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their organizations, and Meta wiped out internal leaderboards.
This tension between hype and ROI is exactly the situation NEA partner Tiffany Luck is living in these days. She started by convincing companies that e-commerce is the future and is now fully committed to AI, especially with regard to its potential for “magic moments” in consumer businesses.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year’s AI IPOs, and how startups are working to help companies track AI cost-effectiveness.
Listen to the full episode and hear what’s next.
What the shift from tokenmaxxing to ROI means for how companies measure AI spending. Why forward-deployed engineers are the “Trojan horse” for AI deployment. How companies are mixing and matching models rather than committing to one provider. Why Tiffany believes value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just the model layer.
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