AI Cost Allocation Models for Growing Teams
AI spending is easy to approve when it is one pilot and one invoice. It becomes harder to explain when marketing buys writing assistants, engineering adopts coding copilots, support runs a retrieval system, and a central platform team provides models, vector storage, observability, and agent infrastructure to all of them. The provider bill shows what was purchased. It rarely shows who received the value. A shared model endpoint may serve five departments. One agent may use a model API, retrieval, storage, and three paid tools during a single task. Enterprise agreements may be paid centrally even when usage belongs to individual teams. ...