CFO Slice

Corporate finance leaders are grappling with a new challenge as artificial intelligence (AI) providers increasingly shift to usage-based pricing, making costs harder to predict, monitor, and control than traditional software subscriptions. According to a forthcoming KPMG survey, only 26% of companies have a comprehensive view of their AI spending, while 50% report partial visibility and 22% have little or no visibility until bills arrive. The issue is becoming more pressing as businesses expand their use of AI agents and generative AI tools, with some organizations reportedly exhausting annual token and cloud-computing budgets within months. Unlike conventional software licenses, many AI services charge customers based on token consumption, a measure of computing usage. Major providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Salesforce have adopted pricing models that tie costs directly to usage, creating greater flexibility for customers but also shifting financial risk onto them. Several companies are introducing controls to manage spending. Life360 is developing tools to track token consumption more closely, while buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm monitors AI usage almost in real time after seeing a sharp increase in token consumption driven by AI-assisted software development.