Branden Jenkins was out to dinner when he pulled out his phone, glanced at his AI usage dashboard, and realized his weekend coding session had just cost him $1,000 — charged automatically, in $1,000 increments, to a card set on auto-renew.
Jenkins is the CEO of Maxio, a private-equity-backed software company headquartered in Atlanta that’s on a path toward $100 million in annual revenue over the next couple of years. He’s also, by his own admission, near the top of his company’s internal AI spending leaderboard — an odd place for the chief executive to land. “A thousand is not that much, I would say, but for one weekend, it’s pretty annoying,” he said in an interview with Fortune. Describing his agent as “cooking away,” he described his response as “Wow, I just got here quickly.”
