By Sachin Mohan · AIM Media House
The promise of enterprise AI was efficiency. The reality arriving in June 2026 is a budget crisis that the companies experiencing it are no longer hiding.
Walmart, one of the most advanced AI adopters in US retail, capped employee usage of Code Puppy, its in-house AI agent, after demand for the tool ran so high that unlimited token access became financially unsustainable.
Before the cap, staff had an unrestricted supply of tokens, the unit of data that AI computing runs on. Now each employee receives a set amount.
The company told Bloomberg it wants employees to use "the right AI for the right task." This is a framing that translates, in operational terms, to: we cannot afford to let everyone use as much as they want.
The same dynamic has been hitting companies across the technology and enterprise landscape simultaneously, and the pattern is consistent enough that it has a name. Token shock. How Three Companies Hit the Same Wall Uber's case is the most documented .
CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information in May 2026 that the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April. "I'm back to the drawing board, because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already," he said.
Uber had rolled out Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant, to its engineering teams starting in late 2025. Adoption shot up from 32% to 84% of engineers by March 2026. Per-engineer monthly costs were running between $500 and $2,000. The company's full 2026 AI budget was $3.4 billion.
All of it was gone by the end of April.
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