r/consulting • u/QiuYiDio US Mgmt Consulting Perspectives • 1d ago

Accenture Just Capped Employees’ Claude Spending at $29 a Month. Some Were Spending $1,000

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/accenture-just-capped-employees-claude-132727075.html
524 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

299

u/SpilledKefir consultant_irl 1d ago

I mean… they didn’t cap it, they’re just charging overages against project financials. My analyst is still running up $100s per day it feels like… the spigot is not dry

111

u/Commentor9001 1d ago

I once asked how we were accounting for token cost and offsetting the reduction in billable hour  for deliverables.  I was told "what do you mean technology is an overhead cost"

Its literally pushing project costs onto overhead, why wouldn't you?  free pm good boy points. 

Horrible for the firm doh

8

u/CheeseburgerLover911 12h ago edited 12h ago

can you eli5 that to me? ai is digital labor, so how's that different from an accounting perspective?

11

u/Wise_Departure_9617 8h ago

The way accenture and other consulting firms evaluate the profitability of a project is based on rates per hour charged by employees + expenses. If you are creating $1k in AI spend related to that specific project and the AI spend goes into general firm overhead instead of being included in the project expense you’re making the project seem more profitable than it actually is by not assigning the correct price to its completion

1

u/Greaseskull 35m ago

This guy consultzzz

29

u/massiveweekend 1d ago

They capped it and then sent a memo 30 minutes after this one telling a huge amount of users that their Claude license would be suspended within a week, after “business leadership review”. Except no one can explain who the business leadership is… so when your senior global practice leads also had their Claude licenses revoked and didn’t receive anything to review to make decisions for those in their practice… the whole thing is bullshit.

They did the same for ChatGPT.

And none of it makes sense now that they’ve all but stopped centrally funding it. If projects are paying for it, who the hell is some phantom “business leadership” to revoke the license.

11

u/SpilledKefir consultant_irl 1d ago

I didn’t get that type of notice for either! I just got the “go over and you’re paying for it” messages.

Very curious to see what my team’s bill looks like coming out of October.

11

u/sk1939 Skylounge's #1 Patron 1d ago

Honestly, now that seniors and project leads start getting the bill, i expect that most will crack down on BS usage.

8

u/SpilledKefir consultant_irl 1d ago

Yeah… I mean, I’m not terribly worried about managing the cost (I’m in advisory, not tech), but I’ve been cracking down on people using AI instead of their brains for a while now.

Had a team member repeat some costly and time-consuming analysis in Claude a couple of weeks ago because someone else had started it and she figured it’d be easier to start from scratch, again, rather than using context documentation and outputs from the first go-round. She was flippant about the added cost, and then a couple of days later we received the usage cost notice,..

18

u/Any_Peach_3567 1d ago

I feel like this has disaster written all over it.

7

u/BeneficialAIAgent99 1d ago

The sky is falling and flippy is making burgers now.

29

u/OnlyInEye 1d ago

What is your analyst doing that is generating additional profit 100 dollars a day? You still Bill the same hours. Is your FTE less on the project than projected. At the end you only increased profit would be through fixed rate contracts and reducing manpower. Manufacturing has figured this useless utilization doesnt lead to more profit.

2

u/tadslippy 1d ago

Nobody wants to chase arrears though.

49

u/Consistent-Lemon4259 1d ago

Claude of Duty

85

u/ncjjj 1d ago

> some were spending $1,000

Anyone know their average numbers? I’m sitting around 4k/month lol

28

u/YohIssaRaccoon 1d ago

Yeah my firm said I can have however much as I need, as long I prove I’m using it lol

12

u/Less-Opportunity-715 1d ago

I’m at 5k or so a month.

Tier b sv company

4

u/Alert_Loan_9904 1d ago

Last month I spent 1,500$

47

u/Training-Gold5996 1d ago

Jesus 29 is low.

19

u/Loose-Ice8699 1d ago

That’s like saying « hi » and « goodbye » to Opus 5.5

4

u/EverythingGoodWas 22h ago

And it’s gone

13

u/sloppy_steaks22 1d ago

Julie Sweet has really bungled ACN’s AI execution strategy

6

u/HeyItsYourDad_AMA 1d ago

More like Julie Sour

30

u/Wasting_my_time_FR 1d ago

Finally the chicken are coming home to roost and someone with two braincells (yeah synapse!) has started addressing the elephant in the room: what is the bloody ROI of this whole shenanigan?

10

u/sk1939 Skylounge's #1 Patron 1d ago

There isn’t one, definitely not at the current spend rate.

11

u/Affalt 1d ago

Going to use Kimi to optimize my Claude prompts now.

-1

u/EcureuilHargneux 1d ago

Curious about a feedback on this

3

u/Minimum-Pangolin-487 1d ago

Weekly I’d see the comments from people in a specific country on the Claude feed all saying they’ve hit their limit and want a top up. It was wild they mostly all from the same country.

3

u/Acceptable-One-6597 1d ago

29/mo. Bruh. I'd just pay out of pocket. I genuinely think Accenture is fucked.

26

u/CieraVotedOutHerMom 1d ago

I’ve hear rumors from junior bankers & consultants that AI is getting used not to augment work, but to essentially automate work that would have taken long hours to do.

They’re trying to skirt long hours that every junior worked years prior to them

67

u/Rocketbird 1d ago

What? Doing things faster is literally what everyone has been talking about. Why is that surprising? Doing things better is the sage’s way of using it.

1

u/Gyshall669 14h ago

I’m guessing the “surprising” part is that management wants you to work the same hours at your new efficiency.

15

u/saranghaemagpie 1d ago

Rumors?? That is literally what is happening and that is the point. You still must have human in the loop, but when someone tells me to write functional specifications for four products in less than 6 weeks, yeah dawg, I'm prompt engineering the f out of it. I still must tell it what to do and how to do it with system instructions. You are essentially saying that doing work is a rite of passage and not an end goal. Welcome to innovation.

-6

u/CieraVotedOutHerMom 1d ago

My boss/CEO wants everyone in office 5 days a week working 5-5 since that’s the world he grew up in.

Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches because someone else did

7

u/EcureuilHargneux 1d ago

From my junior POV there's three main use cases as of today :

Make an autonomous regular watch regarding market or customers news

Do X Analysis/Make X ppt deck (check if true, add sources)

Look up in my mails or the form SharePoint X information

3

u/CieraVotedOutHerMom 1d ago

Look I’m leading an acquisition, have Claude synced to my SharePoint data room, it’s built all my investment committee decks, models, analysis, data room trackers, integration plans, lender materials etc with me in the loop auditing everything

But doing all that work manually in banking and working every night until 2-4am in the morning for two months was a right of passage.

2

u/Suspicious_Tone45 5h ago

Isnt that the point?

1

u/CieraVotedOutHerMom 5m ago

Long hours are a part of the progression

2

u/BeneficialAIAgent99 1d ago

Tokenmaxxing capped

2

u/Unknownlegend6 12h ago

Copilot has the Opus 5.5 model and it is excellent. Why can’t they just copilot?

2

u/someonenothete 1d ago

I had to create a press sheet for an audit for a specific item , I used copilot in excel worked great , saved me a few hours . Claude on my commute I get to ask me exam questions , it explains correct and wrong answers very well it’s pretty amazing tool .

0

u/IllustriousSeason888 23h ago

How will they do the needful now?