AI cost governance is the attribution, budgeting and control of AI spend across models, agents, teams and use cases — enforcing limits at runtime and connecting cost back to the identity, purpose and context that generated it.
What is AI cost governance?
AI spend is unusually difficult to control because it is generated by autonomous behaviour: an agent that loops, over-retrieves or retries can consume a budget without any human action. Reporting after the fact does not prevent this. Cost governance requires attribution at the point of the call — by identity, team, application and purpose — and enforcement in the same place, through budgets, rate limits and model routing. Because over-retrieval drives both cost and exposure, cost governance and context minimisation tend to improve together.