The head of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has warned that companies using AI to automate complex tasks will raise its cost in non-linear ways.

Matt Comyn, chief executive of the CBA, was reported by Reuters as having told attendees at an Australian Financial Review conference in Sydney that enterprises will more closely monitor the costs and return on investments of AI as rollouts continue.

“In the early days, you want people to start using the tools – and they didn’t really cost a lot [...] now the way the models work, the amount of context that you can put into it, your costs do not scale on a linear basis,” he said, per separate reporting by the Australian Financial Review.

Many enterprise AI features have to date been sold at a flat fee, either as a recurring subscription to ‘pro’ models by Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI accessed via APIs, or bundled as part of a wider enterprise offering such as Salesforce Agentforce or Microsoft 365.

But model developers are beginning to charge enterprise users per token for AI deployment, meaning that each AI input and output will come with its own cost. For example, GitHub Copilot has switched from a flat fee model to usage-based billing.

Businesses that use AI heavily or deploy agents which operate 24/7 could face a sharp rise in AI spending under pricing models that charge per token.

Comyn added that rising AI costs could also help deter employees from producing “work slop,” a term referring to low quality AI outputs that has become a common refrain for critics of the technology.

“The scarcity is not around ​analysis or the preparation of information or PowerPoints or Word docs," he said. “You can be ​exponentially increasing them if you want to.”

In recent weeks, senior figures in banking have stated that AI will play an increasingly important role in the sector. Reuters reported that Georges Elhedery, chief executive of HSBC, told staff that AI would eliminate some banking roles and create others while Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, said on 22 May that AI will eliminate roles across the banking sector.

Some firms have already linked automation efforts to reductions in headcount, with Standard Chartered having set out plans in May to cut 7,800 roles by 2030 in an effort to reduce what chief executive Bill Winters called “lower-value human capital”.

Winters has since issued an apology for his use of the phrase.

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