The Token Math behind Uber's AI Budget Blowup

Uber's CTO announced last week that his team had burned through the company's entire annual AI budget in four months. 5,000 engineers got Claude Code in December. By March, 84% had drifted from single-shot queries to agentic workflows. The tool didn't change. The per-user cost did. This is where most enterprise AI budgets are breaking right now. Workflow complexity drifts upward. The bill scales with that. Nobody re-forecasts. I wrote up the math: token benchmarks by workflow type, the 40-60% of