THE ECONOMICS OF AGENTS

FINANCIAL OPERATIONS (FINOPS) FOR AI Financial Operations (FinOps) is the practice of managing cloud and technology spending with discipline, so that engineering, finance, and business teams share responsibility for cost. FinOps for AI applies this practice to model usage. The core habits are simple. First, measure: record the tokens and the cost of every run, tagged with the team, the agent, and the type of task. Second, attribute: be able to answer who and what is responsible for each dollar. Third, budget: set limits and alerts so that spending cannot silently run away. Fourth, review: look at the numbers on a regular schedule, for example monthly, and investigate surprises. Fifth, optimize: use what you learn to cut waste, which is the subject of the next chapter. You already met the idea of a budget tracker inside a harness, which stops a single run from spending too much. FinOps is the same idea at the level of the whole organization.