As the cost of running AI models continues to drop, the token economy is reshaping ecosystems far beyond corporate cubicles
Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency – one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent.
Yet, as he noted, that staggering volume “doesn’t even put me near the top of the consumption rankings in my department”.
That currency is not yuan, but artificial intelligence tokens.
“Using AI has become part of almost every task now,” said the employee, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised by the company to speak to the media.
A token – dubbed ciyuan in mainland China – is the basic unit through which AI services are measured and billed. Every prompt submitted to a model and every response generated consumes tokens, much like electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours.
As Chinese tech giants from ByteDance to Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings rush to encourage staff to integrate AI into daily workflows, tokens have become a new kind of corporate allowance. Employees are no longer just budgeting their time; they are also expected to budget their token use as proof of their AI literacy.
This surge in AI use in the corporate sector is being fuelled by a brutal price war. When Hangzhou-based AI unicorn DeepSeek slashed the price of its flagship V4-Pro model by 75 per cent in May, it highlighted the defining feature of China’s AI industry: an accelerating race to make intelligence cheap.