CIOs Struggle to Link Token Spend to Business Outcomes
CIO Dive, Monday, September 14th, 2026
Accenture finds only one in five dollars of enterprise token spend ties to tangible results.
Accenture data shows only one out of every five dollars of enterprise token spend can be tied to tangible results, yet adoption continues: an EY report found more than 4 in 5 businesses concerned about token costs while 37% still plan to expand deployment scope.
Falling prices will not automatically reduce expense, since 42% of executives said they would expand existing workloads if token prices fell 25% or more.
The recommended steps are deploying an AI gateway or observability layer to capture model, token cost and output for each interaction, then making teams accountable for their own token costs and making model prices visible to them. Only about 10% of workloads need frontier-level reasoning.