Most companies didn’t budget for the exorbitant cost of AI tokens, but no company can function without them, Box CEO Aaron Levie told Semafor’s Reed Albergotti at the Semafor Tech summit in San Francisco.

“It just showed up overnight,” Levie said about the ability for workers to write huge amounts of sophisticated code using AI. Large companies that have their budgets modeled down to the decimal are now having 10,000 engineers signing up to Claude Code and getting a “huge bill,” he said.

“In Silicon Valley, that’s okay, because [you] just raise more money, and then [you] can fund the tokens.”

Most of the increased cost is coming from coding agents, but as workers start to develop AI tools around other kinds of workflows, “you should expect that we’ll see another jump in total spend on compute,” he said.

Box, as a cloud storage company offering several AI models, has a broad view of how employees across various organizations are using tokens. It’s also using AI internally to build out its own products. Levie said Box would “cease to function” without coding agents.

“People are actually willing to pay the money,” Levie said. Over the coming years, however, AI users must learn which models are best for specific workloads, so they are not spending an outsized number of tokens on simple tasks, he said.