Also: Rolling out AI agents? 4 ways to move fast and furious - but with extreme caution

In this new world, the token is the basic unit of AI work. J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation, calls it "the atomic unit of AI." In his FinOps keynote, Storment said that "tokens serve more roles in the modern economy than almost any other commodity has in modern history, maybe, maybe oil in the 20th century." Tokens, he told the FinOps X audience, are simultaneously "the unit of output from all of the hardware and compute and data centers," "how the labs price their outputs and inputs," and "the value unit that enterprises are looking to monetize."

That abstraction is precisely why labs and hyperscalers like it. Instead of charging for GPU types, memory, and power directly, they can expose a single unit -- tokens per million -- over a bewildering mix of architectures and deployment topologies. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others now publish per‑model rate cards with separate prices for input tokens (everything you send the model) and output tokens (everything it generates back), usually quoted in dollars per million tokens.

Also: Building an agentic AI strategy that pays off - without risking business failure