On Thursday 12 November, Reuters reported on a survey by the IT consulting firm Capgemini of large companies’ AI spending. The survey covered 500 executives in ten countries whose companies have annual revenue of more than $1 billion. Capgemini itself helps companies embed AI into their systems.

Of the respondents, 59 per cent said AI spending over the past 12 months had been significantly above their expectations or budget, by 24 per cent on average. Some 53 per cent of executives are worried about AI costs, up from 45 per cent a year earlier.

Jawlah, which focuses on startup news from the Middle East and North Africa, reports further figures from the Capgemini study. It says 21 per cent of organisations exceeded their budgets by more than 30 per cent. Only 56 per cent are fully confident they can forecast how costs will change as use grows.

Users can download the model weights of an open-weight model and run them on their own servers or on servers they choose. Examples include models from DeepSeek and Mistral. Closed models, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, are used through the developer’s cloud service.

A cheaper token is not the whole price

Capgemini said tokens for open-weight models were on average 87 per cent cheaper than those for closed models. A token is a chunk of text, and model use is usually priced by the number of tokens.

Capgemini highlights OpenRouter, a service that provides access to models from several developers. In September, open-weight models handled 72 per cent of its traffic but accounted for only 27 per cent of the money spent on use. Jawlah notes that the figures apply to OpenRouter and may not hold for all companies or the market as a whole.

Jawlah also points out that running an open-weight model is not free. A company needs computing capacity and staff to maintain, secure and monitor the models. In the Capgemini study, about half of executives said AI spending was sometimes approved without a sufficient picture of total costs, Jawlah reported. Only about a third can reliably estimate indirect costs such as checking outputs and fixing errors.

Closed models stay for demanding tasks

Half of the respondents plan to use closed models where the complexity of the task justifies the higher price. More than three-fifths of executives expect their organisation to move to a multi-model strategy within the next 12 months, Jawlah said. Under such a strategy, routine tasks go to cheaper models and demanding tasks to more advanced ones.

Reuters links the survey to other news pointing in the same direction. In October, SAP’s chief financial officer said the company would replace some of its most expensive AI models with cheaper ones where performance is maintained. Anthropic launched its IPO roadshow this week. Reuters reported that the company warns in its prospectus that customers may shift to cheaper options, including open-weight models.