Two companies doing the exact same business. One spends $10K a day on LLM tokens. The other spends $200 a month. Which one does Polymarket favor?
The answer isn’t obvious, and the fact that it isn’t obvious is the interesting part. The $10K-a-day company might be building something the $200 company can’t see yet. Or it might be burning money on tokens the way companies once burned it on billboards. From the outside, today, you can’t tell — and it’s a fair bet most boards can’t either.
The money is real and getting bigger. Menlo Ventures’ annual survey put enterprise spending on generative AI at $37 billion in 2025, up from $11.5 billion in 2024, and found that half of developers now use AI coding tools daily, rising to 65% in top-quartile companies. Spend that more than triples in a year doesn’t stay buried in “other operating expenses” for long.
How long before investors in public markets fasten on the tokens-spent-per-employee ratio? Revenue per employee is an old and familiar yardstick. Tokens per employee could become another number investors ask for. A high number could mean leverage and it could mean waste — the ratio alone won’t tell you which, and that ambiguity is precisely why analysts will want it.
And what variety of companies are we all building here? Ten people with a $10K daily token bill and a thousand people with a $200 monthly one are different animals, even if they sell the same thing to the same customers. One of them has started paying for its labor by the token.
What’s your token per employee number?
