Exclusive: Salesforce takes on "tokenmaxxing"
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Salesforce is unveiling a new way to measure AI productivity, pushing back on Silicon Valley's fixation on "tokenmaxxing" — the belief that consuming more AI tokens signals real work.
Why it matters: As companies race to prove they're using AI, Salesforce argues raw token consumption is a vanity metric and wants to replace it with one tied to actual business results.
Driving the news: Agentic work units, or AWUs, are Salesforce's new metric, designed to measure output and impact rather than token consumption.
- AWUs translate AI inputs — including tokens and compute — into outputs, or the work completed.
- Salesforce tells Axios that Singapore Airlines uses AWUs to track how long agents take to resolve customer service issues. Williams Sonoma uses the metric to gauge how agents reason through product recommendations.
- It's a complex formula with an output that's unique to each Salesforce customer measuring how much bang they're getting for their AI agent buck, the company says.
By the numbers: Salesforce has seen triple-digit growth year-over-year in AWUs, and has already generated 2.4 billion AWUs across its platform as of Q4, according to metrics shared with Axios.
What they're saying: "I could tokenmax by running endless loops with Claude Code that led to nothing... but if customers didn't actually get that much work out of it, then what's the point?" Madhav Thattai, executive vice president and GM of Salesforce AI, told Axios.
State of play: The new metric comes amid an obsession with token use in Silicon Valley.
- Meta recently took down its employee-built token leaderboard after The Information reported employees used 60 trillion tokens in 30 days.
- "I can't breathe thinking about how panicked I am [about token use]," said Brian Alvey, chief technology officer of WordPress VIP, at an Axios event in San Francisco.
- Imbue co-founder Josh Albrecht added that he hadn't shaved in part because he's been so busy shipping new code with Claude.
Between the lines: The pressure is on for technologists who built their careers coding as AI takes over that work.
- But Salesforce argues using AI tokens isn't the best way to prove productivity. Rather, what you do with those tokens is the better measure.
Yes, but: AWUs could end up being another vanity metric. Salesforce designed the formula, defines what counts as a "unit," and controls the benchmarks. Without outside auditing it might continue to be difficult to suss out success.
Salesforce isn't the only organization pushing back on token usage as a productivity metric.
- "Outcome maxxing >> token maxxing," HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan wrote on LinkedIn.
- Appian CEO Matt Calkins compared tokenmaxxing to the Soviet Union evaluating chandeliers based on how heavy they were, telling Axios tokenmaxxing is silly.
What we're watching: How companies redefine success in AI adoption.
- "I see customers that go into this agentic journey saying, my goal is agentic transformation, and that is not a good goal," Thattai says. "I want customer satisfaction ... and we want to make sure that they're able to achieve that."
Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that Alvey was panicked about his token use.
