The Linux Foundation’s new “Tokenomics” offshoot formally launched this week – and the world’s largest listed company has put a Chief Financial Officer on its board, in a sign of the importance that growing numbers of companies are ascribing to tracking the value and cost of generative AI. 

“The rate of change in AI consumption is unlike anything we have managed before,” said board member Arvind Joshi, a COO and CFO at JPMorganChase, adding that Tokenomics is about “establishing a consistent framework to evaluate and optimize across model selection, use case patterns, architectural choices, and value outcomes.”

Among the challenges on its roadmap: creating a framework for “relating AI spend to outcomes, starting with the share of work completed without human involvement, measured against what the process costs today.”

Members (spanning a mix of technology and financial services firms: think Accenture, BNY, Equifax, Lenovo, Oracle, SAP etc.) will also be working on the Big-T Framework: “A methodology for classifying the token and related AI cost complexity of workloads ahead of model routing activities between the most cost effective frontier or open source models.”

Also on the board of the newly launched foundation is Nishant Gupta, Chief Availability Officer, Salesforce: “Token economics,” he said, “is fundamentally more… opaque than anything we've managed at this scale before. Input versus output tokens, cached versus non-cached, pricing structures that don't behave like compute or storage. It requires a different operational muscle than the one the industry built for cloud.”

Tokenomics Foundation Executive Director J.R. Storment commented: “The real total cost of AI spans compute, storage, data, and the people who build with it. Every CEO is being asked to show returns on all of that without a shared way to count it. That is why this Foundation exists and is working together on pre-competitive frameworks, benchmarks, and specifications, built in the open, so the entire global economy can accelerate value from AI rather than just account for the spend."