What is an AI Token?

An AI Token is a unit of measurement for the cost and volume of interaction with artificial intelligence models. Every time you send a request to an AI service, the text of the request and the response are broken down into parts — tokens. A token can represent a character, a syllable, or sometimes an entire word. The number of tokens determines how many resources the model will spend processing the information.

When you interact with LLM models, your request is split into tokens, and each of them affects the result. The more tokens there are in a message, the more computational resources are required for the response. Therefore, the number of tokens directly determines the speed, cost, and scalability of AI solutions.

An interesting fact is that different languages have different “costs” in tokens: English text usually requires fewer tokens than Ukrainian or Japanese. Overall, optimizing token usage is becoming an important skill in prompt engineering.

Thanks to tokens, businesses gain a transparent mechanism for calculating expenses, can plan budgets more effectively and predictably, and make informed strategic decisions about their own products.