After Rippling blew millions on AI in months, it built an employee ROI tool

Second, enterprises now know they need an AI gateway that routes prompts to the best, most cost-effective model for the task. Rippling came to that conclusion too. So it built its own AI gateway that is also part of this product. MacInnis says it is possible for enterprises that already use another gateway to still use the AI Spend Console product, though if they want the features that govern spending, they would need to use Rippling’s gateway.

AI Spend Console produces dashboards (once known as leaderboards in the tokenmaxxing days) that score attributes such as prompts per day combined with work output (lines of code/pull requests) and spend.

With this tool in place, Rippling said it dropped its token spend from 40% of its headcount budget to about 15%. But it didn’t curtail AI usage. The company spent a peak of 605 billion tokens the month the CFO issued his warning, MacInnis shared. In July, internal usage hit 600 billion tokens again, yet “the cost of July’s token spend was 37% of the cost of April’s token spend,” he said.

“That’s just because now we’re routing to the more effective models,” he said, joking that “we’re not letting the sales team do grammar updates using Fable.”

But technology solutions aren’t enough, Rippling notes. The company found people using AI effectively and made them “AI captains” tasked with assisting the rest of the company.

Still, such efforts to use AI beyond engineering are a work in progress, MacInnis says, as software engineers have been the primary users so far. But Rippling is, for example, working on it for customer onboarding teams to automate some mailing data and data-reconciliation tasks. The dashboard will then measure productivity in terms of onboarding more customers.

“We have to be able to link token consumption in G&A functions and in customer-facing functions back to productivity. If we can’t do that, all bets are off on any of this stuff being available to the broader employee base,” MacInnis says.

So, if Rippling is an example, tokenmaxxing may have swung so far the other direction that employee AI access may no longer be like Slack or email. If the company can’t measure productivity, then all employees might not have access.

As for the product, AI Spend Console is included for Rippling’s HR subscribers, though there are additional AI usage-based costs. It can also be purchased as a stand-alone product and integrated with another HR system of record, MacInnis says.