Work perks are taking on new meaning in the AI boom.
Speaking at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event in Seattle on Tuesday, Microsoft EVP Charles Lamanna talked about a job candidate who said they would come aboard as long as their team was given a certain dollar amount of AI tokens — the fuel that powers interactions with AI systems.
Lamanna didn’t reveal the exact dollar amount request, but said “you should think of $100 to hundreds of dollars of token cost per day, at the limit.”
The anecdote reflects how access to AI models is becoming as fundamental as salary — and how quickly AI is moving from experimentation to a core part of day-to-day work.
If a “fully loaded” (total cost of an employee to a company) engineer costs $500,000 a year and the employee asks for $100,000 worth of tokens — which makes them three times as efficient — Lamanna said it’s a great deal for everyone involved.
He compared denying engineers sufficient AI resources to stripping away basic workplace tools. Imagine showing up to work with no mouse, no email, no Microsoft Teams — that’s how an engineer accustomed to AI-powered coding agents would feel working under a tight token budget, he said.
“So how you think about what it means to hire, and fully loaded cost, and where we invest is going to change completely as a result of this,” said Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Business Applications & Agents. He sees this happening beyond software engineering — to multiple other forms of office and information work, such as financial planning.
“They’ll be like, I’m not going to work there unless I actually get a certain amount of token budget,” he said.
Lamanna isn’t alone in seeing this shift. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week said AI tokens would become “one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley,” CNBC reported. In a blog post last month, venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz described inference costs as a potential fourth pillar of engineer compensation alongside salary, bonuses, and equity. “Will you be paid in tokens?” Tunguz wrote. “In 2026, you likely will start to be.”
The New York Times last week reported on how employees at tech companies are competing on internal leaderboards that track token consumption, creating a new status game called “tokenmaxxing.”
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