FinOps for AI Agents: Who Spent All the Tokens?

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Official Description

When an autonomous agent finishes a task successfully but costs ten times more than it did the

previous day, traditional application monitoring fails. A recursive tool loop that retries silently,

an oversized context window that quietly expands, or an unflagged model upgrade can burn through an

entire budget long before a human notices. The execution appears successful on functional

dashboards, meaning the only clear signal of failure is the cloud invoice at the end of the month.

As AI systems move into production, tokens have become a primary operational resource alongside CPU,

memory, and storage, yet few teams manage them with equivalent systems rigor. Most architectures

lack the granular visibility required to attribute token spend to specific users, agents, or

workflows, and they lack mechanisms to terminate a runaway loop before it triggers a financial

incident. This session treats token consumption as a first class systems problem, demonstrating how

to make it observable, attributable, and enforceable across complex agent workflows. The

presentation covers practical engineering patterns for instrumenting token usage at every model call

and tool invocation, attributing costs down to specific users or business operations, surfacing

expensive execution paths, and enforcing runtime budgets, quotas, and circuit breakers to halt

runaway behavior in real time. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for governing agent

spend deliberately, transforming tokens into a managed operational resource rather than a surprise

line item on the cloud bill.

Related YouTube Video

Your Agent Failed in Prod. Good Luck Reproducing It. - Tisha Chawla & Susheem Koul, Microsoft (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

Transcript Status

Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

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