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The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI

ID

12004

Status

new

Published

08 Aug 2026, 12:18 AM

Fetched

08 Aug 2026, 1:00 AM

Provider

Simon Willison

Category

developer-ai

Original URL

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/7/pdfs-are-terrible/

Source URL

https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/

Excerpt

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI There's a fun anecdote from Accenture (apparently via leaked meeting audio recordings) in this 404 Media piece from June 24th: “We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors [...] you were talking about,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, said [...] Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into markdown: is that right?” That’s when Kwak says that’s what Accenture’s own data shows. Maybe if Accenture figure out that PDFs are a terrible medium for communicating information they'll be able to push that message out to the rest of the business world too! Via @404.media on TikTok Tags: pdf, markdown, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-misuse