TBM Therapy, Tokenomics, and Golf
Happy Summer!
A client of mine had an idea for a TBM conference session that I loved so much I promised that I'd submit it as a TBMC session. The pitch was myself and a fellow TBMC practitioner opening with some of our own messy TBM stories and challenges. Then the audience submits, anonymously and live, the hardest things they're actually working through, and the room solves them together in real time. TBM Therapy in spirit. Unfortunately it got rejected, and I get it, conference agendas are built to showcase what worked, not what's still an open wound. That's kind of the whole point of this newsletter, a digital version of the hallway conversations we have at conferences. So what's the thing about your TBM program you'd say in a hallway that you'd never say on a stage?
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TBM stuff I'm thinking about...
Back in May, I told you I thought AI token economics would be the hot topic this summer, and that I was doing the research to see what companies were actually doing about it. In June, the Linux Foundation announced it's launching a Tokenomics Foundation to build open standards for how enterprises measure and govern AI token spend, and J.R. Storment said: token costs are now a CEO-level concern. A few days later at FinOpsX, Fidelity's SVP of Engineering Excellence said, “a lot of companies did a lift-and-shift with cloud, got some of the benefit, and never went back for the rest.” She thinks AI is heading the same way. At Falconbridge, we're building out an AI-specific version of the FinOps playbook we already run for cloud. We're pulling the actual usage data from the AI platforms and figuring out what practical guidance we can give orgs (e.g., which settings and policies move the needle on spend, then putting a real number on what each one is worth). Not a framework for framework's sake, the goal is a short list of things your team can change this quarter that make a real dent in the budget. If your AI budget requests are getting approved faster than your cloud ones ever did, I'd love to hear how your TBM team is reeling that back in.
Gboyega Adebayo
Founder & Managing Director, Falconbridge
P.S. I've been wanting to put together a TBM golf outing here in Chicago. So if you're interested let me know, and I'd love to scout a round in Miami during conference. If you're in, let me know and feel free to forward to others.