Australia’s CBA flags surging AI costs as tasks grow complex, slams ‘work slop’
SYDNEY, June 2 (Reuters) – The cost of using artificial intelligence will rise in less predictable ways as companies use the technology for complex tasks, the chairman of Australia’s largest bank said on Tuesday, calling “spending a major emerging governance issue”.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn said businesses globally will tighten scrutiny on AI-related spending by 2026 as adoption accelerates and pressure to demonstrate return on investment grows.
His remarks highlight a growing constraint on the rollout of artificial intelligence in corporate Australia, as well as managing workforce disruptions and the heavy energy and water demands of data centers powering the surge in computing.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if companies are actually looking at this over the course of this year,” Comyn told the Australian Financial Review conference in Sydney.
Unlike most consumers who use free or fixed-cost AI services, enterprise users pay based on the amount of text processed, called tokens. When AI was first introduced in companies, token costs remained reasonable because the tasks were relatively simple.
But as models evolve, Comyn said, the more “reasoning, access to tools, your token costs don’t scale on a linear basis with the amount of context you can put into it.”
CBA, Australia’s second-largest company, which underwrites a quarter of the country’s mortgages, is positioning itself as an eager adopter of AI. Last week, it hosted its own AI summit, featuring OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and hired the country’s first AI scientist at a bank.
On Tuesday, Comyn said rising AI costs could have an upside: curbing the proliferation of low-value output, or what he called “business disruption.”
“The shortage is not about analysis or preparation of information, PowerPoint presentations or Word documents,” he said. “You can increase these exponentially if you want.”
(Reporting by Byron Kaye, Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
