In Defence of Tokenmaxxing

Wed, 20 May 2026 14:24:51 +0100

Looksmaxxing, careermaxxing, Londonmaxxing – I am not online enough to understand the latest internet discourse du jour. One trend, however, that has not escaped me, is tokenmaxxing. In particular the criticism levelled against the practice as a symptom of just how performative and superficial AI rollout in the enterprise has become. Whilst those criticising seemingly pointless token consumption are right that, obviously, tokenmaxxing does not drive direct commercial value, and is yet another apathetic workplace practice couched in the ironic language of social media, I’m keen to push back on the idea of it necessarily being ‘valueless’ – reframing it as such, just requires us to understand the fundamentally emergent, unstructured and messy, nature of agentic AI adoption in the enterprise.

Thoughts on Arthur Lee

In Defence of Tokenmaxxing