AI meter is running, India’s IT clients are rethinking their models

SUMMARY: As enterprise AI consumption soars, clients are shifting routine work to smaller models and reserving larger ones for complex tasks.

New Delhi: As companies scale artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, rising token consumption is pushing clients of India’s largest technology services firms to rethink which AI models they deploy for different tasks.

Three of India’s five largest tech services firms—Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, HCL Technologies Ltd and Wipro Ltd—said during their latest earnings calls that customers are rethinking their AI model mix to contain rising token bills, shifting routine work to smaller models and reserving larger ones for more complex tasks.

Tokens are the basic units of data that AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude break language into. The more a company uses a model, the more tokens it consumes—and the larger the bill.

“The unit cost is becoming cheaper while total AI consumption is growing exponentially, so enterprise AI bills are increasing even as the underlying technology becomes more efficient,” said Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research.