Agent spend control across the company (L5)
Once agents run continuously, consumption becomes a real line item. This play puts every AI workload on a named owner, a budget, and an alert, so cost is managed before finance discovers it in a quarterly true up.
The steps
- 01
Inventory every consuming workload
Tool: Manual
List every agent, assistant, and automated workload with an owner, a business purpose, and a meter. Unowned workloads are terminated, not investigated. Owner: finance plus ops. DoD: inventory is complete with zero unowned entries.
- 02
Attribute consumption to teams
Tool: Snowflake
Push usage data into the warehouse and attribute it by team and workflow. Vendor dashboards will not reconcile to your cost centres on their own. Pitfall: relying on a single vendor console when spend spans several providers. DoD: a team level monthly consumption report exists.
- 03
Set budgets with alerts before caps
Tool: Manual
Alert at fifty and eighty percent of budget, cap at one hundred and ten. Hard caps with no warnings break production workflows during quarter end. Owner: workload owners. DoD: alerts tested by simulating a threshold breach.
- 04
Publish cost per outcome
Tool: Snowflake
Report cost per resolved ticket, per qualified meeting, per generated brief. Raw spend is meaningless without a denominator. Owner: finance partner. DoD: at least three cost per outcome metrics published monthly.
Tools in this playbook
- Manual
- Snowflake
Next playbooks
Unfamiliar terms are defined in the AI and Revenue Dictionary. Related frameworks live in the framework library.