Splunk conference highlights growing importance of AI trust and tokenomics

At this week's Splunk .conf26 conference in Denver, Cisco Systems Inc. and its Splunk unit made a bold bet that the scarcest resource in today's enterprises isn't intelligence or graphics processing units, it's trust.

Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel framed the issue around four key vectors: inference is the new workload, agents are the new workforce, tokens are the new currency, and trust is the new currency of adoption.

According to Patel, in February, tokens consumed by agents exceeded those consumed by humans for the first time, a trend that's only accelerated over the past seven months. Agents are now consuming five times as many tokens as humans, with 60% of global AI compute capacity going towards inference rather than training.

To address this shift, Splunk is introducing Tokenomics, a new capability that allows customers to track and forecast token spend across agents and coding tools. This feature will help customers optimize their agent spend and avoid costly surprises, such as the $500,000 an hour estimated cost of honoring expired promotions.