IT firms rethink billing as artificial intelligence reshapes work

AI tokens) going to be part of our commercial model. We're going to factor in the price of the tokens into our model itself, on top of it,” said Balazs Fejes, chief executive officer (CEO) of EPAM, during the company’s analyst day.AI tokens are small units of texts that an AI tool can read.

These include words, numbers, and even punctuation marks that are part of a prompt.Fejes said that clients traditionally pay for these tokens and while EPAM works as a service integrator, this could change going forward.“It's a work in progress, how we're going to charge our clients because all the tokens’ price is very volatile, so it's very difficult to figure out how to price it in at this point of time but we expect that once we are more in the fixed price or more advanced models, the compute will be included in our price,” added Fejes.Fejes’ comments come as the technology’s pace of evolution raises questions about the relevance of IT outsourcers. Shares of IT services providers have fallen by more than 15% since the start of the year as AI tools increasingly eat into their core work of software development and maintenance, coding and customer support.EPAM was one of the fastest-growing companies last calendar year.

It ended 2025 with $5.46 billion in revenue, up 15.46% on a yearly basis. This makes the company almost the size of Tech Mahindra Ltd, which is India's fifth-largest IT services company.A fifth of EPAM’s workforce, or 12,200 employees, is based out of India, which also became the company’s largest talent hub in 2024.EPAM reported $105 million in AI-native revenue during the October-December 2025 period and expects $600 million in AI revenue by year-end.EPAM is not the first to shed light on billing AI work.