2025 / Early 2026: "Use as many tokens as you can! We need the whole team adopting AI. We're going to put up a scoreboard showing who's using the most tokens and hand out these cool trophies!"
Mid 2026: "This is getting expensive. Let's try to be more pragmatic about our AI usage."
(the big AI players go public, and their financials come under greater scrutiny. They tighten the screws even more on usage)
2027/28: "Only use AI where it's absolutely necessary. Just enough that we can keep telling our customers and investors we're an AI company with a straight face."