NCCapital

The biggest blocker to sustainable AI deployment has emerged as inference cost. GitHub recently abandoned its flat-rate Copilot subscription in favor of usage-based billing, after agentic coding sessions drove costs beyond what a fixed monthly fee could absorb — some subscribers woke up to bills several times higher than they’d been paying. Uber, meanwhile, burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months, largely on Claude Code, leaving its COO questioning whether the returns justified the outlay.

In response to growing concerns over AI token costs, the Linux Foundation has launched the Tokenomics Foundation. The initiative is backed by major technology companies including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce.

The Tokenomics Foundation aims to develop open standards for measuring and managing AI token expenses. This effort acknowledges that enterprises currently lack consistent methods to track and control their AI-related costs.

For companies deploying AI agents at scale, the economics of using frontier models have become a critical challenge. Managing these costs is increasingly seen as an existential issue for many organizations.

Flo Crivello, former engineer and product lead at Uber, is the founder and CEO of Lindy. The company offers a no-code AI agent platform that automates routine business tasks such as email management, meeting scheduling, and CRM operations.

Crivello founded Lindy in 2023 as a strategic pivot from his previous startup, Teamflow, a virtual office platform. The $52 million in capital previously raised for Teamflow is now supporting the development of Lindy.