AI coding token costs are on track to rival human payroll

CIO.com summarizes a Gartner forecast that growing use of coding agents and consumption-based pricing could push per-developer AI spending to unprecedented levels over the next two years. The piece anchors the projection to the post-June-1 token-billing era and Microsoft's intern

The Gartner forecast, by analyst Tushar Tyagi, argues the agentic-coding cost curve is steeper than most enterprise budgets are prepared for: a single heavy agent user can run up $1,000–$2,000/month in token spend, and most companies don't have visibility into which engineers are doing so. CIO.com ties the forecast to the Microsoft story (Forbes, June 1) and to GitHub Copilot's token-based billing (TechCrunch, May 30) as the two real-world data points supporting the projection. The piece is becoming a reference for CIOs writing 2027 budget justification memos.