James Reinhart said nothing should be done to slow employees’ use of AI because the benefits will outweigh those initial costs eventually.

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. —The costs of implementing AI across enterprises has surprised some executives in recent months — but it isn’t stopping ThredUp from becoming an AI-first organization.

“I was both surprised and didn't care at all,” ThredUp co-founder and CEO James Reinhart said at the RetailClub AI Festival conference in California last month when Retail Dive asked if he was surprised by the costs of scaling AI use.

The company’s token usage increased faster than he originally envisioned, but Reinhart believes nothing should be done to slow down employee use because the benefits will outweigh those initial costs eventually.

“I'm confident that advancements in AI technology will provide significant cost savings for the business by reducing the need to grow headcount as fast and by helping our teams to be more productive,” Reinhart told analysts during a Q2 earnings call in August.

As a public company, Reinhart said at the RetailClub AI Festival that ThredUp just needs to get better at projecting these costs.

The chief executive spoke about the secondhand e-commerce company’s efforts to utilize AI across the business during the industry conference in Huntington Beach. To demonstrate his AI commitment, Reinhart presented a slidedeck he had never seen before, but was built using Claude and QA’d by his own assistant.

“I thought this would be like a really interesting experiment,” Reinhart told the audience.

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