Branden Jenkins was out for dinner when he checked his phone and discovered that a weekend coding session with an AI agent had cost him $1,000.

Jenkins, CEO of Atlanta-based software company Maxio, had been using Claude to write and debug code remotely. His account was configured to automatically replenish his token balance in $1,000 increments, meaning his card was charged without requiring another approval.

The incident was frustrating, but Jenkins said the bill itself was not his biggest concern.

“A thousand is not that much, I would say, but for one weekend, it’s pretty annoying,” he told Fortune. Describing his AI agent as “cooking away,” he recalled his reaction as, “Wow, I just got here quickly.”

Instead, Jenkins said the bigger challenge is what AI adoption is doing to employees who fear they are falling behind the technology — or even their own colleagues.

Jenkins describes himself as a technical CEO who builds his own AI agents and automations. He said he can code from his phone using Claude, allowing him to continue working even while away from his desk.

Unlike many employees at Maxio, Jenkins does not face the same internal spending limits.

“I don’t have governors where a lot of my staff hits limits, and they have to ask for approval,” Jenkins said. “So I started leaning in and going, ‘What does this look like?'”

He found that some spending came from AI agents drifting away from the original task.

“A lot of times it’s the agent’s own mistakes that’s burning your money,” Jenkins said. “You kind of find yourself just chatting, and [things] getting away from you.”

He said users can encourage an AI system to continue exploring an idea before realising it has taken the task somewhere they never intended.

Jenkins subsequently experimented with ways to reduce token consumption, including assigning different tasks to different AI models.

He used lighter models such as Claude's Haiku for basic tasks and reserved more expensive reasoning models for complex work.

He also used third-party tools designed to shorten AI responses. One approach he called “Caveman mode” forces an AI assistant to provide brief answers, which Jenkins estimated can cut token use by 70%.

“These are nerdy things,” he said. “Do we need sales leaders and service leaders and marketers finding this stuff?”

Jenkins said the biggest challenges of AI adoption at Maxio are inefficiency, inequality and insecurity.

He recalled building AI tools for parts of his organisation himself, only to find that some employees felt threatened by how quickly he was adopting the technology.

“[Token overspend] is really not the problem, but it could easily be the excuse,” Jenkins said.

One employee told him: “This put me on edge. I should be coming to you with these things. I’ve got to catch up. I feel so behind.”

Jenkins said employees are increasingly asking: “Am I doing my job? Am I keeping up? Will this replace my job? Will this replace my team members?”

The company also faced concerns over unequal access after rolling out ChatGPT broadly but providing Claude to only about 50 employees, largely in sales and marketing.

“People were like, wait a minute, why don’t I have Claude? Why do they get that and we don’t get that?” he said. “That’s an inequality.”

Maxio has responded by incorporating AI into its organisational structure. Jenkins said executives mapped their departments using both human employees and the AI agents those employees manage.

The company has also expanded DevOps oversight of internally built “vibe-coded” tools, which Jenkins said cannot depend on a single employee.

“It can’t just be with Tim that vibe-coded it on the weekend,” he said, citing security, scalability and continuity concerns.

Jenkins believes AI is already changing Maxio's hiring equation, with headcount no longer growing at the same rate as revenue.

“I’m not arguing that we want to reduce a whole bunch of headcount because of AI, but we should not be growing the headcount at the same rate that we were before,” he said. “That’s a big change in our business, and it’s all attributed to AI.”

Despite the risks, Jenkins remains bullish on AI.

“Right now there’s so much good that outweighs a lot of this,” he said.

For him, the occasional $1,000 AI bill may simply be an early sign of the costs companies will have to manage as AI agents become more autonomous.

“It probably will be a thing.”

Anjali Thakur is a Senior Assistant Editor with Mint, reporting on trending news, entertainment and health, with a focus on stories driving digital conversations. Her work involves spotting early signals across news cycles and social media, sharpening stories for SEO and Google Discover, and mentoring young editors in digital-first newsroom practices. She is known for turning fast-moving developments—whether news-driven or culture-led—into clear, tightly edited journalism without compromising editorial rigour.

Before joining Mint, she was Deputy News Editor at .com, where she led the Trending section and covered viral news, breaking developments and human-interest stories. She has also worked as Chief Sub-Editor at India.com (Zee Media) and as Senior Correspondent with Exchange4media and ’ City, reporting on media, advertising, entertainment, health, lifestyle and popular culture.

Anjali holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miranda House, and is currently pursuing an MBA, strengthening her understanding of business strategy and digital media economics. Her writing balances newsroom discipline with a clear instinct for what resonates with readers.

Stay updated with the latest Trending, India, World and US news.

Download the Mint app and read premium stories

Log in to our website to save your bookmarks. It'll just take a moment.

Oops! Looks like you have exceeded the limit to bookmark the image. Remove some to bookmark this image.