One of McKinsey's top AI leaders explains how it's stopping staff from overspending on tokens

Consulting firms moved quickly to make AI part of employees' working lives. Now they are confronting the cost of using it at scale.

One of McKinsey's strategies for managing rising costs isn't to cap consultants' use of AI but to let them know when they're using too much.

The firm tracks consumption on a user-by-user basis and alerts its employees via email when their AI usage gets too high, said Debasish Patnaik, who leads QuantumBlack — McKinsey's AI, data, and analytics group — in the UK. The alert system was introduced firmwide in the summer.

"Similar to using mobile data on a work phone, we tell them this is how you could do things to make it more cost-effective for the firm," said Patnaik.

Companies that initially focused on encouraging AI experimentation are now confronting the cost of operating the technology at scale.

The age of freewheeling AI token use came to an end earlier this year as LLM providers moved from subscriptions to consumption-based pricing models. Consulting firms and other enterprise users are now charged based on the number of tokens — the small chunks of text an AI model reads and produces — they use, rather than a flat access rate, making efficiency more important as usage grows.

In September, OpenAI announced that its most prolific users of AI coding agents now consume more than $7,000 worth of tokens a day.

McKinsey's approach to managing that spending pressure rests on transparency and education, Patnaik said.

By May 2026, the firm was processing about five trillion AI tokens a month, according to a company blog post. Consumption was highly concentrated: about 10% of users accounted for roughly 65% of the total, with consultants and software engineers among the heaviest users.

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The AI usage alerts aren't intended to discourage employees from using AI, but to show them what they are consuming and help them complete the same work more efficiently.

"We really believe in giving autonomy to the consultants," said Patnaik.