New Delhi, July 6 -- The artificial intelligence (AI) boom that India's largest information technology giants spent three years championing now comes with a costly caveat: the token bill.

After first flagging the phenomenon of tokenmaxing-or excessive AI token consumption-in January, IT firms are now aggressively tracking these expenses. Swelling AI operational costs threaten to eat up enterprise tech budgets and drag down revenue growth, just as the industry enters what is expected to be its weakest quarter in years.

The fundamental unit of data processed by large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude is a token-essentially the building blocks used by AI to analyse and generate text, image and software code...