Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push the use of AI as far as possible. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew its annual AI budget in a matter of months, some companies removed Claude licenses for parts of their organization, and Meta killed its internal rankings.
This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where Tiffany Luck, NEA partner lives these days. She started convincing businesses that e-commerce was the future, and now she’s turning her attention entirely to AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities of “magic moments” in the consumer sector.
In this episode of TechCrunch Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year’s AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help companies track the return on AI spending.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
- What the shift from tokenmaxxing to ROI means for how companies measure AI spending.
- Why front-deployed engineers are becoming a “Trojan horse” for AI adoption.
- How companies mix and match models instead of committing to a single vendor.
- Why Tiffany believes value is created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model level.
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Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. His work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast and other publications.
You can contact or check Rebecca’s outreach by sending an email rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message to rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.
Theresa Loconsolo is an audio producer at TechCrunch and focuses on Equity, the network’s flagship podcast. Before joining TechCrunch in 2022, she was one of two producers at a four-station conglomerate where she wrote, recorded, voiced and edited content, and designed live performances and guest interviews like Lovelytheband. Theresa is based in New Jersey and holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from Monmouth University.
You can contact or check Theresa’s outreach by sending an email Theresa.loconsolo@techcrunch.com.
