Who Gets to Fly First Class? Value per Token in the AI Factory

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Jeremy Eder

Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat

AI-driven code generation, Jeremy Eder argues, is not economically viable without discipline: token spending can outrun budgets before anyone notices. Eder, a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, describes the token budgets per engineer, centralized AI gateway, and factory model used there, and defines value per token as business value delivered divided by tokens spent. He explains how priority should come from systems of record such as the CRM, issue tracker, and security feed rather than from guesswork, and walks through an illustrative queue in which business rules and a tighter budget reorder three requests. He also shows why a model's price per token does not equal its cost per job, since retries and failed runs count. Attendees will learn how to rank work, route it to the cheapest model that clears the evaluation bar, and which roles, such as curator and trajectory miner, nobody yet owns.