Odd Lots · Saturday, June 27, 2026
Winston Chang, CFO of Lenovo, highlighted concerns about uncontrolled AI token spending, citing an anecdote of an engineer spending $100 million a month. He emphasized the need for CFOs to allocate capital effectively, focusing on return on investment and driving productivity gains through AI, particularly in areas like inventory management, data spend, and marketing.
“So as a CFO, I would have concerns because that was clearly not in the budget, right not saying that I was from the Novo So we cannot have that happen. And I think we need to be able to drive the productivity or efficiencies as it relates to that budgeting of the token generation.”
“And I think in that case, it's probably one where they weren't sure in terms of that what they were particularly doing in terms of spending. It wasn't in budgeting, and that goes to the point of what is happening today. I think most enterprises were at the early stages of how people were changing from a subscription based model to a token usage model in terms of the compute capabilities, and so that is at the beginning and enterprises are starting to figure out how do I really track that spend and therefore, what do I really want to get out of that return?”
“So from those perspectives, I think it works out. And then of course, areas like marketing where we're spending a lot out there in terms of you know, video and other production generation, those actually can be done by AI today, so we really need to look at that.”