One Employee Spends Rp18 Million a Day on AI, Cost-Cutting Attempt Backfires

Microsoft, which has been encouraging all its employees to use artificial intelligence (AI), now has to rein in its usage. Leaked internal data shows that one employee spent US$28,000, or around Rp18 million, on AI usage in just 28 days.

That figure far exceeds the average employee’s salary, prompting management to step in and ask all staff to exercise restraint, according to reports from Futurism and Gadget Review on Sunday (30/8/2026).

The data was recorded in an employee payroll spreadsheet that was leaked to the public. A new column titled ‘Monthly AI Spending’ shows that of around 350 employees whose data was recorded, the average AI spending was only about US$300, or around Rp1.9 million per month.

However, one employee from the Customer and Partner Solutions division spent nearly a hundred times that average. Several other employees were recorded spending more than US$10,000, or around Rp64 million a month, while their colleagues in the same division spent only tens of dollars.

Seeing the wasteful use of AI, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of the CoreAI division, Jay Parikh, sent an official circular to all employees in early August. He asked that AI usage be limited and no longer carried out excessively without clear calculation.

‘Spending tokens carelessly is not the goal we want to achieve. I want us all to focus on maximising results that provide real benefits for our customers and our business,’ Parikh wrote in the circular.

As a cost-saving measure, Microsoft decided to replace the AI model used as standard within the company. All employees will now be switched to the GPT-5.6 Sol model developed by OpenAI, a version that is far more cost-efficient and does not consume much computing power.

The Microsoft case is not the only one. Other giant companies such as Amazon are also reported to have once created a leaderboard praising employees who used AI the most. However, when the bills started coming in and soaring uncontrollably, the leaderboard was immediately shut down.

This shows that technology companies are apparently not ready to bear the real costs of the push they themselves have spread. All this time they have been enthusiastic about encouraging everyone to use AI everywhere, but the costs it incurs are very expensive and not necessarily commensurate with the benefits produced. Now that the bills have arrived, they are only just realising that crazy and undirected AI usage actually harms their own companies.

For Indonesia, this lesson is very valuable. Adopting new technology is indeed important, but it must be accompanied by careful cost-benefit calculations. Otherwise, technological progress that should help can instead burden operational costs by up to hundreds of millions of rupiah every month.