Token economics — what an AI workforce actually costs.
Token budgets, ROI math, and why Jensen Huang told the room engineers will be paid in tokens alongside salary.
Video module · in production
Read along below. The video drops shortly.
Software used to be a fixed cost. Agents are variable cost. That's the most underappreciated business-model shift of the next decade.
By the end of this module
- Build a back-of-the-envelope ROI model for your first pipeline
- Understand the difference between subscription pricing and token-metered pricing
- Plan an annual token budget for your operation
Tokens are the new compute
Every action an agent takes consumes tokens. Reading a document costs tokens. Writing a draft costs tokens. Calling another agent costs tokens. Tokens are priced per million and falling fast. The cost of doing one unit of work is dropping more than 10x per year.
Quick ROI math
Take the manual workflow. Calculate: (hours per week × $/hour fully loaded × 52 weeks) = annual cost. Compare to (tokens per execution × executions per year × token price). For most workflows we deploy, the AI workforce costs 1-5% of the human cost. The pipeline pays for itself in week 2.
Token budgets are the new salary
Jensen Huang's GTC quote: he'll give engineers half their base salary in tokens on top, because every engineer with token access is 10x more productive. This is the new comp structure. Companies that don't budget tokens for their team are competing with companies that do.
Do this · before the next module
Calculate the human cost of your target workflow.
Hours × rate × frequency. Be honest about fully-loaded cost (benefits, overhead, opportunity cost). This is your annual baseline.
Estimate the token cost.
We can model this for your specific workflow on a strategy call. Most workflows we ship cost $50-500/month at production volume. ROI math gets silly fast.
Set a token budget for your team.
Pick a number. Per engineer, per month. Watch what happens to output. The team that has tokens will out-ship the team that doesn't.
Workbook · 5-minute exercise
Calculate the annual fully-loaded cost of one of your manual workflows. Now imagine it's automated for 1-5% of that cost. What do you do with the savings?