Walmart Gave 2 Million Employees a Free AI Toy and is Shocked by the Bill
Walmart launched an internal AI tool called Code Puppy — adorable name, catastrophic timing. They told 2.1 million employees to use it freely, with zero limits. Turns out, "freely" is expensive when every query costs real money.
Now everyone gets a token allowance. Code Puppy has been leash-trained.
The deeper problem: AI providers are ditching flat subscriptions for pay-per-use, which means every slide deck, every spreadsheet, every "can you rewrite this email to sound less passive-aggressive" request now has a price tag. Multiply that by two million people and you get a number that makes finance teams cry.
It gets better. Employees had been token maxxing — hammering AI tools not to do better work, but to hit KPIs and climb internal AI leaderboards. A Sequoia partner literally told the Wall Street Journal "we should all be tokenmaxxing." Companies cheered. Accountants did not.
Meanwhile, Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Four months. Gone.
Walmart's fix: pick your AI model carefully, use it only where it adds value, and please stop asking the expensive frontier model to make pie charts.
The lesson: "Encourage everyone to experiment with AI" is a great culture initiative and a terrible procurement strategy.
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