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Amazon is (once again) pleading with its workforce to stop using AI indiscriminately.

In an internal memo published to Amazon’s website on Tuesday, the company described “tokenmaxxing”—the once widespread business practice of encouraging employees to use AI as much as possible—as “deeply flawed” and “disconnected from what matters.” Too great an emphasis on employee inputs (i.e., token usage) rather than outputs, the memo said, can wind up driving up company costs and make some tasks more complex than they need to be.

That message flies in the face of the sales pitch coming from big tech companies (Amazon included), who have promoted AI products as an easy way for individuals and businesses to save time, and in some cases, even save money. (Meta, for example, has said its Muse AI agent can flag and cancel old subscriptions that users have forgotten about and are still paying for.) There’s been a wholehearted push over the past four years, backed by many billions of investor dollars, to integrate AI into virtually every consumer product. Businesses of all sizes, meanwhile, have faced pressure to experiment with AI and weave it into their daily workflows, or risk being left in the dust of other, more tech-savvy competitors.

Tokenmaxxing was the extreme manifestation of that business trend. For a brief period earlier this year, some tech companies introduced internal leaderboards tracking employees’ AI usage and incentivizing them to drive it up.

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