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Publication Date: 2026-09-16 18:57:00
Kathy Gibson reports from Nutanix .Next in Sandton – For much of the 20th century, oil was the currency that drove the economy. As we entered the 21st century, businesses started to refer to data as the “new oil”.
Today, organisations are realising that data is only useful if it can be accessed and used – and artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be the best and fastest way of doing this.
Raif Abou Diab
In fact, Raif Abou Diab, regional director: South Gulf, Oman and sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix, turns the AI value proposition on its head, explaining that the important thing is not the model, but how it relates to the data.
But, as companies around the world realise the value they can unlock with AI, they are running into a new – and very expensive – issue.
The cost of tokens is threatening to overwhelm many businesses, but there is a seemingly limitless appetite for them.
Jason Langone, global AI director at Nutanix, points out that token consumption has grown by about 17 000-times in the last four years, with a massive 38-trillion of them processed in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
Agentic AI is largely responsible for this growth: while basic chatbots consumed thousands of tokens to perform basic tasks, agents typically use tens of thousand per task, while autonomous agents could consume in the millions for long-run, multi-step workflows.
“And bear in mind that we are still in chapter one of agentic AI,” Langone says. “This consumption…
