A leaked Microsoft spreadsheet shows one employee spent $28,000 on AI in 28 days against a $300 median

On August 24, 2026, Business Insider reported it had reviewed an internal spreadsheet Microsoft employees use to voluntarily and anonymously compare pay. This year it gained a new self-reported column, "AI $ Usage Per Month." Of about 350 US employees who filled that field in (out of nearly 600 total entries, against Microsoft's roughly 223,000-person global headcount), the median reported spend was about $300 over a 28-day window. One person, in the Customer and Partner Solutions organization, reported $28,000 in the same period.

The spread underneath the median

The variance wasn't confined to one outlier. CoreAI's 14 respondents reported a $975 median, more than triple the company figure, with individual entries as high as $16,000. Cloud + AI's 107 respondents ran as high as $15,000, and Security's 12 respondents up to $10,000. Business Insider is explicit about the data's limits: self-reported, voluntary, not comprehensive, and, per its analysis, showing no meaningful correlation between an employee's reported AI usage and their bonus, raise, or promotion odds. A Microsoft spokesperson said the usage-tracking tool itself is "still in early testing."

The memo came first

Microsoft's concern predates the numbers. On August 4, three weeks before Business Insider's story, CoreAI EVP Jay Parikh told engineers to default GitHub Copilot to OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in place of the Claude models it had been auto-routing to. According to CNBC, he told staff: "Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for." Microsoft divisions had begun operating under formal AI token-budget targets the month before, in July 2026, though Parikh said CoreAI itself had not yet set hard per-employee caps.

This is Merit AC's thesis playing out inside one of the world's largest AI spenders. A spend number nobody had systematically tracked varied 90-fold between a typical employee and an outlier, and the company's response was to ask whether the extra tokens produced outcomes worth the money. It treated high usage as a question, where it could have counted it as engagement. Microsoft is drawing the line between spend and value by memo and leaked spreadsheet. A dashboard does it continuously.