Rippling Found AI Token Costs Reaching 40% of R&D Budget

Rippling discovered in March 2026 it was on track to spend 40% of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens — the paid API calls to language models — growing 80% monthly. About 10–15% of staff drove 60% of spend; one engineer burned $50,000 monthly. Management called the findings "incredulous" and launched AI Spend Console on August 6, 2026.