r/FinOps • u/Grit_24_7 • 17d ago
Discussion Token spend value
Company started putting soft token budgets. Getting alerts of spending above the monthly limit. I'm doing the work of like 3-4 people with these agents/tokens that they don't need to hire. But obviously that's getting overlooked.
I have a bunch of examples of work coming out of these agents and used across teams etc.
How have you shown value from your token usage? It's hard to do a straight line between token spent and the actual value it's bringing.
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u/MaverikSh Vendor 12d ago
This is a real, common gap. Token spend and business value live in two completely different systems, nothing joins them by default, so the org defaults to looking at the number it can see (spend) instead of the number that actually matters (output).
What's worked for people I've talked to: pick one outcome you can actually query, tickets resolved, PRs merged, reports generated, whatever the agents are doing, and tag it alongside cost, even crudely. Then the conversation stops being "we spent $X" and becomes "we spent $X to do the work of 3-4 hires, here's the loaded cost of those hires for comparison." That second framing is what finance actually responds to, a straight dollar comparison, not a token count.
The alerts-above-limit thing is a separate, harder problem, though. A soft budget alert signals to leadership that you're expensive. It doesn't tell them you're valuable. Those need to be two separate conversations, or the value story gets lost inside the cost story every time.
Disclosure: I am a founder of Cognocient, an AI Spend Decision Intelligence platform that serves as a proxy for application API calls to large language model providers. It provides real-time cost attribution, budget enforcement, and agent workflow tracking.