A common trend emerging in larger enterprises is token budgeting as a major topic. As agents can do more and more long running tasks, and thus take vastly more compute, allocation of tokens across teams becomes a very real thing in the enterprise. Companies spend a meaningful amount of time deciding how much to spend on talent, marketing campaigns, events, laptop setups, and even the cost of lunches. Tokens will be no different. Tokens will similarly need to be excruciatingly well-managed because you’ll need to ensure you don’t blow up your budget, and you’ll need to ensure that the tokens are flowing to the highest and most useful parts of work. You don’t want to find out you burned your monthly budget on something relatively low value and then be blocked on the much higher value task later. Doing this at large company scale is extremely hard as you have layers of abstraction on data and visibility into the digital work being done by agents in any central way. This is going to mean that agentic spend will increasingly will expand beyond the confines of the IT budget, and end up in organizational budgets like other expenses. Ultimately team and org leaders will have to be given budgets for this, but even they don’t have adequate visibility and controls in most cases. We’ll need all new software just to solve this problem, and it’s probably an opportunity for startups in its own right. Going to be an all new era of enterprise resource allocation, especially while we compute constrained.
在较大型企业中，一个正在显现的普遍趋势是：token budgeting（token 预算）正成为一个重要议题。随着 agent 能执行越来越多的长时任务，因此也会消耗多得多的 compute（算力），企业内部按团队分配 token 会变成一件非常现实的事。公司本来就会花相当多时间决定在人才、营销活动、线下活动、笔记本电脑配置，甚至午餐成本上各花多少钱；token 也不会例外。token 同样需要被极其严密地管理，因为你必须确保不会把预算烧穿，也必须确保 token 流向那些价值最高、最有用的工作环节。你肯定不想发现自己把整个月预算烧在了某个相对低价值的事情上，结果之后面对高得多价值的任务时反而被卡住。在大型公司规模下做到这一点极其困难，因为你会面对多层数据抽象，而且几乎无法以某种中心化方式看清 agent 所完成的数字化工作。这意味着，agentic spend（agent 相关支出）将越来越多地突破 IT 预算的边界，像其他费用一样进入组织层面的预算中。最终，团队和组织领导者都必须为此拿到预算，但即便是他们，在大多数情况下也并没有足够的可见性和控制能力。我们将需要一整套全新的软件，仅仅为了处理这个问题，而这本身很可能就是创业公司的一个机会。这将开启一个全新的企业资源分配时代，尤其是在我们仍然受制于算力约束的时候。