At Match Group, every employee now has an AI budget.
The parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps recently began giving department heads a set amount to spend on AI, which is then distributed across their teams. Employees can track their usage on a dashboard, and if they want to exceed their budget, they have to explain why. The company’s most expensive AI models also aren’t available by default and require a specific use case.
“If you don’t set guardrails, there’s no reason for an engineer to not go use the most expensive model,” said Match Group CFO Steve Bailey. The average software engineer at the company spends roughly $600 a month on AI tokens, he said.
Match Group’s system reflects a growing reality across corporate America: As companies spend billions on AI, CFOs are emerging as some of the most powerful executives in the AI era.
Finance chiefs are doing more than signing off on AI budgets. In many cases, they’re the ones deciding who gets access to AI tools, how much employees can spend, which vendors make the cut, and whether AI investments are generating enough value to justify costs.
“The CFO is really becoming the face of the AI story,” said Peter Pollini, a PwC advisor to finance chiefs in the financial-services sector.
A spending boom
The stakes are enormous. Match Group initially allocated $5 million for AI this year, but it’s now on track to spend double that amount, Bailey said. The increase followed CEO Spencer Rascoff’s May push to make the company more AI-native by expanding access to AI tools across the workforce. Initially, they were available mainly to engineers.
“Aside from maybe travel and entertainment, we’ve never had to budget for a cost that’s this big at the employee level,” Bailey said.
To help fund those investments, Bailey said Match Group plans to dramatically slow hiring while it assesses how AI could reshape its workforce.
Across corporate America, similar calculations are turning CFOs into the gatekeepers of one of the biggest spending booms in decades.
At Elevance Health, CFO Mark Kaye oversees a hidden way of keeping AI costs from spiraling. The insurance giant quietly routes employees’ queries to different AI models based on the complexity of the request. That’s because a single prompt can cost anywhere from a few pennies to more than a dollar, depending on how many tokens, or units of data, employees gobble up.
“We manage it on the back end,” said Kaye, adding that he expects Elevance Health, the parent of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, to invest $1 billion or more on AI this year.
Making AI pay off
Some CFOs are making tough decisions about how to fund AI expenses at large, such as by freezing annual salary raises and laying off workers. Others say AI is helping to pay for itself.
Kaye said AI automation at Elevance has reduced administrative work tied to medical-chart reviews by roughly 40%, giving staff more time to support customers.
“There are significant inefficiencies in the system that AI is allowing us to take out,” he said.
Keeping a tight leash on AI spending isn’t the only new hurdle for CFOs. They’re also responsible for managing spending on a category that is evolving more rapidly than previous generations of enterprise software.
For the first time this year, Xero, a global small-business platform that offers accounting, payroll, and payments, added a line item to its budget for AI token spending per employee, said Claire Bramley, the CFO. The company also created a task force to review software purchases and identify AI products it can do without.
“Do we have more than one tool that serves the same purpose?” Bramley said. “As a CFO, you want to make sure that everybody’s not going off and doing their own thing.”
AI is also changing who CFOs spend time with. Bramley said finance, technology, and HR leaders at Xero now work together more frequently to evaluate software purchases, hiring plans, and how AI could affect future staffing needs.
“You could probably do it once a month before, and I think you have to do it weekly today,” she said.
Additional headaches
CFOs are also facing new business problems arising from AI.
Netta Samroengraja, finance chief at healthcare platform Zocdoc, said her team has had to hustle to evaluate AI tool providers to solve problems that, ironically, were created by the technology. In recruiting, for instance, the technology suddenly enabled job seekers to flood the company with applications and create phony personas.
“It was pretty prevalent very quickly, and so we had to react quickly,” Samroengraja said.
That wasn’t the only surprise, as the economics of AI were shifting, too. Early on, Zocdoc raced to vet vendors, anticipating that prices designed to attract customers at the start of the AI boom would increase over time.
The company used that window to test multiple providers and compare their cost and effectiveness before settling on the tools that delivered the strongest business results, Samroengraja said, adding that Zocdoc has been willing to spend more on tools that produce measurable business outcomes rather than optimize for the lowest possible AI spend.
“If you see the ROI in it, you should keep investing in this,” she said.
A crowded AI market is making those decisions even harder. New providers are constantly pitching tools that promise to boost productivity, cut costs, or replace existing software, forcing many CFOs to take a more active role in evaluating vendors, said Alex Sobol, cofounder of the Millennium Alliance, an invite-only community for C-suite executives in North America and Europe.
“It seems like every hour there’s a new AI vendor,” he said. “It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s fake, and what’s good and what’s bad.”
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