8x8 and Claude: token usage, $5M saved and Opus costs

8x8 has rolled Anthropic’s Claude across roughly 1,800 employees and says the tool helped cancel subscriptions that amount to about $5 million in annual costs, an estimate covering the past 18 months. The company adds that its annualized bill for Claude is "well below" that figure, though executives expect usage and spending to converge as adoption deepens.

How 8x8 is using Claude and tracking tokens

Employees use Claude for drafting emails, analyzing customer feedback, and writing code. Management encourages all staff to check an internal dashboard that shows individual and team usage, a setup designed to bring teams along rather than punish excess. In May, product and customer success teams were the heaviest users, while sales and finance were among the lightest.

Sales and finance together account for 28 percent of 8x8’s head count but only 15 percent of token consumption, management says. The company is considering tighter controls as usage grows. Executives discussed restricting access to the Claude Opus 4.8 model, released last month, because it costs nearly 1.7 times more than an Anthropic offering from February. Access to Opus might require proving that older models cannot do the task, Joel Neeb, chief transformation and business operations officer, said when weighing cost tradeoffs. He also asked Claude to rework an automation to use tokens more efficiently and cut that workflow’s token usage by 80 percent.

The broader token squeeze in tech

Token budgeting has become a common topic across corporate earnings calls. Royal Bank of Canada’s CEO disclosed a 500 percent surge in token usage over six months. Cisco says one third of employees use an internal AI chatbot daily. Amplitude’s CEO said some top engineers spend thousands of dollars a month or more on tokens. Box’s CEO described token budgeting as one of the most important and heated conversations in his company.

Roughly 300 companies addressed token questions during earnings calls or public analyst discussions in April and May, a large jump from 93 companies that mentioned "token" in the same months a year earlier. Some firms are building or buying monitoring systems to track token consumption and to route prompts to cheaper models when possible. Others are still deciding between hiring more staff or allocating larger token budgets to meet goals.

Not every company sees token spending as a cost to be immediately capped. Baseball Lifestyle 101 told about 50 of its top managers to spend the equivalent of about 20 percent of their salary on AI tokens each month. The brand expects $250 million in sales this year and says token costs could exceed $100,000 a month by year-end. The company credits Claude with helping land a $1 million order after the model identified inventory gaps for a retailer.

Why it matters

Token-driven bills are creating an operational fault line inside companies. For now some finance teams are pleased because AI has replaced subscriptions and cut costs, but new model releases and shifting pricing can quickly change the math. Firms that do not track token flows risk surprise spending, while overly restrictive policies can block productivity gains. That tension helps explain why companies are investing in usage dashboards and model-routing tools and why access to higher-cost models like Opus 4.8 is already under scrutiny.

What to watch

Watch whether 8x8 implements caps or requires justification for Opus 4.8 access, and whether other firms adopt model-routing systems that pick lower-cost models by default. Another tell will be how many companies move token-tracking from pilot projects into formal budgeting line items during upcoming earnings seasons.