Corporate AI Adoption Splits Into Token Maxers, Average Engineers, and Searchers
Pedro Franceschi · The Most AI-Pilled CEO We Know · Y Combinator · Jun 10, 2026 · at 10:53
Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex, outlines his framework for how different segments of a company utilize artificial intelligence.
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“The way I describe AI adoption inside most companies is I think there's like sort of three tiers. There's tier number one, which is your token maxers, like your engineers that are pushing a bunch of code and typically living inside coding harnesses. And those are sort of well-known. We know who those are. Then you have the sort of average engineer that is building a few things, but you know, not, not sort of token maxer to the same degree and probably, I don't know, a 10th of the productivity. And then you have like the entire rest of the company and the entire rest of the company typically Is interacting with AI in what I call like Google search mode way, which is a chat bot with a few MCPs or a G suite equivalent that you, yeah, you have a few tools from Google, but at the end of the day, it's really just like a search.”
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