Nav employees may spend NOK 7,500 a month on AI

Nav, the Norwegian labour and welfare agency, lets individual employees spend up to NOK 7,500 a month on AI tokens. Aker BP also has high token budgets for individual staff, and both organisations say they are working to make their use of AI tools more efficient and to get the most out of them.

Hans Kristian Flaatten, a platform developer at Nav, told the technology outlet Digi that most employees have a sober level of consumption that reflects the work they do. He said Nav does not engage in "tokenmaxing", meaning the practice of using as many tokens as possible.

Flaatten also stressed that tokens can cost taxpayers a lot of money, and that Nav is very conscious of this. The agency's approach is therefore not to maximise AI use, but to use it deliberately.

Nav has also developed a set of rules and frameworks for AI development, which it has made freely available at ki-utvikling.nav.no.

The story matters because it shows how a large public body handles the cost of AI tools in daily work. Generous per-person budgets give staff room to use the technology, while the agency keeps an eye on public spending and on how the tools are actually used.