Accenture Tells Employees to Spend Only $29 on Claude per Month | Hacker News Reader

Accenture Tells Employees to Spend Only $29 on Claude per Month

404media.co

28 pointsilreb13 comments

> Meaning, if an employee goes over the allocated $29 — and $29 is nothing compared to the costs some Accenture employees are raking up — workers have to find a specific project or team (called a Work Breakdown Structure or WBS at Accenture) to fund the rest of the usage.

It sounds like they need Claude usage to be tied to a paying customer so they can bill that customer for that usage. That's how many services organizations work.

that would just pass on the AI costs to the customers, unsure if they will just accept the new line item on their bill.

Do 404media links get auto de-ranked on HN? I know it's a contentious publication in the SV tech circles. I'm surprised this isn't higher up.

Not sure if that's the case, few of my hn posts do get de-ranked on hn very fast such as [1] and [2]. If you can prove it using https://news.social-protocols.org, you should report it to hn@ycombinator.com

[1] https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=50102854

[2] https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=50068946

I think $29 is not the main thing here, the WBS rule is - consulting companies already put flights and software costs on the client invoice. I'm pretty sure tokens will go same way, in a year or so AI usage will be just one more line in the invoice. And the $29 is only for internal work, where there is no client to pay for it.

From my experience monthly limit in dollars is the worst option. The $20 plans from vendors reset limits every few hours, so you can't spend everything on day two. With $29 per month you spend it in two days and then wait four weeks.

I get the concern over tokenmaxxing and dead-end projects, but they are going to lose talented people over such petty limits, and hold back the work they do for clients.

One would imagine they've run the numbers and found it to be unproductive to spend more on Claude.

I question whether the numbers they are looking at capture everything that's going on.

$100/mo on Claude Max for me (probably headed to $200/mo by years end). The time saved on tedium, the analytic insights I can generate for clients, and the progress I can make on R&D is difficult to assess and measure within my small business P&L.

Perhaps the average employee at this organization is ill-equipped to make good use of AI. Efficiency and effectiveness might be a function of a good engineer wielding it, while a bad engineer might burn through tokens just to keep up.

Or maybe that's just me in the bargaining stage of my career collapsing.

This is not a "might". That's literally how I've seen it way too many times now.

The same employees that are already not the greatest, that take the longest, that get stuck in rabbit holes the most, that have to be corrected in code review the most (because they took a fundamentally wrong turn/decision and just ran with that) are the ones spending the most tokens to do more of exactly that and "faster".

They still take the longest because they do something with AI, badly, and then try to fix it, with AI, for more and more tokens. They get stuck in rabbit holes because AI takes them there just like they went there before by themselves but now it just also costs tokens on top. Code review usually means you catch a wrong turn within like the second sentence of their three page AI generated PR description that invalidates a huge 1500 line PR entirely. That thing cost lots of tokens and now needs to be redone for eveb more tokens.

makes perfect sense, they don't need that many people now thanks to AI, if they can quit themselves that would be great.

Just don't let the markets hear that. Quiet now.

$29? So basically one half decent session to plan and half-build some moderately complex task? Per month?

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