Like a lot of tech leaders, Mike Taylor found himself awestruck by Claude Code late last year. Soon he was starting most mornings with meeting prep that Claude created for him and building agents to distill tedious tasks down to minutes. He often had several Claude terminals running what was then Anthropic’s most advanced model. He encouraged his team at Gusto, a startup in San Francisco that sells human resources tools to small businesses, to try the tech out, too.
But a few months in, when Gusto published a leaderboard tracking employees’ AI engagement, Taylor was startled. It turned out he wasn’t just a superuser; he was also a superspender, racking up costs that were disproportionately high for the work he was doing. What’s worse, Taylor is Gusto’s chief financial officer. “That’s not a good look for me,” he says.