After Rippling blew millions on AI in months, it built an employee ROI tool

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  "detected_at": "2026-08-07T21:30:11+00:00",
  "company": {
    "name": "Rippling",
    "domain": "rippling.com"
  },
  "data": {
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/after-rippling-blew-millions-on-ai-in-months-it-built-an-employee-roi-tool/",
    "title": "After Rippling blew millions on AI in months, it built an employee ROI tool",
    "author": "Julie Bort",
    "excerpt": "HR software provider Rippling this week unveiled AI Spend Console , an anti-tokenmaxxing product that helps a company track and contain its AI spending. One of the most interesting features is that it maps how much individual employees, teams, and roles are spending and if they are genuinely more productive, or generally producing more AI slop. The company promises the tool will show “which engineers have high AI spend whose peers frequently ask them to redo work in code reviews,” the company says in its blog post . The tool was born after Rippling went all in on tokenmaxxing at the start of the year - as so many did - only to discover employees were wildly burning cash. Chief Product Officer Matt MacInnis still recalls the executive team meeting in March when CFO Adam Swiecicki presented a number that shocked them. Rippling was on track to burn 40% of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens, meaning it was spending as much on tokens as 40% of all the compensation it paid employees in that unit. Millions of dollars. (The R&D org is home to engineering at most tech companies.) Spending was growing by 80% month-over-month, and if that trend continued, the next year it would spend almost as much on AI tokens - 90% - as it spent on its high-paid R&D unit employees. “We were incredulous,” MacInnis told TechCrunch. Management immediately undertook an “urgent” project to understand the...",
    "product": "AI Spend Console",
    "summary": "HR software provider Rippling launched AI Spend Console, a tool to help companies track, contain, and analyze the return on investment of their AI spending.",
    "planning": false,
    "image_url": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Rippling-AI-Spend-Console.png?resize=1200,717",
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    "published_at": "2026-08-07T21:30:11Z",
    "article_sentence": "HR software provider Rippling this week unveiled AI Spend Console , an anti-tokenmaxxing product that helps a company track and contain its AI spending."
  }
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  -H "X-API-KEY: $AUTOBOUND_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain":"rippling.com","limit":20}'