FinOps for AI Agents: Who Spent All the Tokens? — Tisha Chawla & Susheem Koul, Microsoft
Agentic AI lacks cost control planes, driving a shift from token maxing to value maxing.
“people are proud to call themselves token billionaires”
Microsoft engineers Tisha Chawla and Susheem Koul argue the agentic AI era has no equivalent of cloud autoscaling or SaaS usage caps to govern token spend, leaving enterprises exposed to runaway costs. They cite real incidents—Uber exhausting its AI budget in four months and companies burning hundreds of millions in days—as evidence the industry must move from maximizing token consumption to maximizing value per token. The talk frames this as a structural gap in the agentic control plane, not just a budgeting problem.