Disney is pulling back the curtain on internal AI usage and letting its employees see who’s tokenmaxxing.
Loading audio narration…
The Mouse House has given some tech staffers access to an “AI Adoption Dashboard” that tracks token usage across AI coding tools Cursor and Claude, Business Insider has learned.
The dashboard shows staffers a wealth of data — including the number of employees actively using AI, the number of requests made, and the number of tokens used over a given period.
The dashboard also displays the most active AI users by requests made and tokens used, according to a screenshot of the dashboard viewed by Business Insider. One streaming tech staffer referred to it as a “leaderboard.”
The biggest AI power users make hundreds of requests per day on average and use tens of millions of tokens, the dashboard shows.
Tracking AI usage has led to a so-called “tokenmaxxing” trend, where software engineers compete with their peers to maximize their AI token usage when using chatbots. However, there’s debate in the tech world about whether to incentivize high token usage given the associated costs.
Disney employees are being emboldened by managers to use AI tools more often, though that comes with higher costs, the streaming tech staffer said.
“They’re celebrating it now, but we’ll see how long that lasts,” this person said of AI usage at Disney.
One Disney employee invoked Claude about 460,000 times over nine work days in mid-April, according to the dashboard. That works out to around 51,000 times per day.
That high usage likely comes from autonomous agents, a second streaming tech staffer familiar with the AI adoption dashboard said.
While this employee said they monitor their AI usage and try to “minimize wasteful token use,” they’re not worried about it, saying that Disney will “just give me more quota if I get capped.”
Disney’s evolving AI strategy
Disney employees aren’t the first to get access to an AI usage dashboard. Meta employees created a similar internal dashboard to track Claude token usage, nicknamed “Claudeonomics,” before the company shut it down in early April, The Information reported, adding that Meta had used 60 trillion tokens in 30 days.
Meanwhile, Visa is encouraging employees to use AI and giving prizes to power users. The payments giant was using 1.9 trillion tokens a month, as of March, the company told Business Insider.
Disney’s AI adoption dashboard has been around for months, the two streaming tech employees said, so it predates Josh D’Amaro’s appointment as CEO. D’Amaro took the top job in mid-March after running Disney’s parks and cruises business.
D’Amaro must decide what Disney’s AI strategy will look like now that the company’s blockbuster partnership with OpenAI fell apart. The Disney-OpenAI deal would have given employees access to ChatGPT while putting AI-generated short-form video on Disney+.
The Mouse House has warmed up to AI in the last year, several staffers previously told Business Insider, by providing employees with tools like Claude, Cursor, and a “DisneyGPT” chatbot for internal requests.
AI is a “top priority” for Disney, a high-level employee with direct knowledge of the company’s AI strategy previously told Business Insider.
