# 43% of tech leaders are over their AI budget. They're still spending.

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The Mallet

👋 Hello, Retool community!

Last week we published new survey data from 101 technical leaders on how companies are managing AI costs in 2026. The picture is more complicated than the headlines suggest. 43% of leaders are already over their AI budgets, but that hasn’t made them pull back. Only 8% are showing any hesitation about adoption.

Poor visibility into what’s running is driving this overspend. Our June AI Governance Report found that just 5% of CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs say they’re confident they know what AI-generated tools are running in production—and shadow AI is much more likely to produce surprise bills than AI that's governed. Agentic workflows don't help: they use roughly 5–30x more tokens per task than a simple LLM query, per Gartner.

If costs spiked 20%, the most popular response was consolidating to fewer vendors (32%)—not cutting AI outright. Model routing is gaining ground for the same reason: directing routine requests to smaller, cheaper models instead of paying frontier prices every time.

Read the findings →

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See you next month! ☀️

Kelsey McKeon

Content @ Retool

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