We have entered a new era of competition. When intelligence was the sole domain of humans, firms with a monopoly on scarce talent could sustain a clear advantage. But now, as AI models achieve PhD-level knowledge on nearly every topic, intelligence is becoming more scalable and accessible. When intelligence is abundant, advantage comes not from having it but from applying it to business problems more productively than competitors can do. Because that intelligence is deployed through the consumption of tokens—the language and currency of AI models—we call this “token-based competition.” The name is deliberate: it echoes time-based competition, the source of advantage BCG first introduced in 1988, when speed became a new basis for winning.

The advantage comes from putting AI at the center of how work gets done, both through automation and by augmenting the capabilities of human employees. Tokens multiply what knowledge workers can produce, much as the assembly line did for manufacturing. The firms pulling ahead are redesigning their processes around AI, with people applying expertise to direct and improve the system. These companies operate at a pace and scale that human-only organizations cannot match. Moreover, if the winners of token-based competition get it right, they’ll have created workflows that will improve organically over time as AI gets better, faster, and cheaper.

The reward for this could be significant. We analyzed token consumption at 107 public technology companies with more than $500 million in trailing 12-month revenue. In software engineering, roles and ways of working are already being reshaped to optimize human and AI skills. Token consumption can be measured consistently across companies through AI coding environments such as Cursor, making software engineering one of the first functions where token-based competition is observable in real usage data. Among our sample, the pattern is consistent with productive token use beginning to translate into advantage: companies in the highest token-use quintile had 16.5% median year-over-year revenue growth, compared with 5.1% in the lowest-usage group.