In Frank Herbert’s novels, spice is the currency that controls the universe. In the economy of 2026, it’s something far more down-to-earth, but almost as powerful: AI tokens are the basic means of working for a growing number of professions, the cost of which no one has clearly allocated in budgets.
Charles Lamana, Microsoft’s executive vice president of agents and business applications, asked the question directly at the March 24 GeekWire event: “Imagine coming to work and being told, ‘You’re not getting a mouse, just a keyboard. No email, no Teams. You have to walk to people or send a fax.’ You’d think, ‘What kind of company is this?’ and you wouldn’t stay.”
The analogy is not hypothetical. Lamana recounted a recent conversation with a potential job candidate who told him, “I will come on the condition that my team receives at least X dollars of tokens per day.” Lamana didn’t reveal the exact amount, but suggested it could be hundreds of dollars a day, and it wouldn’t be a bad deal. “If an engineer costs $500,000 in total, $100,000 in tokens per year to make him three times more productive is a great deal for everyone involved.”
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, went a step further and proposed a new compensation model at the GTC keynote that would give engineers a token budget on top of their base salary: “I can easily imagine that in the future every engineer in our company will need an annual token budget. They’ll make a few hundred thousand dollars a year. I’ll probably give them half of that on top of that as tokens, to be boosted 10x. Of course we would do that. It’s now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon valley How many tokens come with my job?”
The emergence of an agency workforce further complicates the picture. In an environment where humans and bots collaborate, tokens are not just a personal resource — they are now a payroll for digital workers. Lamana goes even further: “For large parts of my team, I have products with incredible scale and massive revenue, where no human is writing a single line of code directly — zero lines of code written by a person directly in the codebase.”
Aaron Levi, CEO of Box, warns business leaders to start discussing how to budget for these AI token accounts, especially as usage begins to grow across the workforce. Token budgets are both an incentive and a cost, but who will pay for them? Companies that don’t proactively address that question risk losing talent to those who already have the answer, reports The AI Economy.