FinOps for AI Agents: Who Spent All the Tokens?

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. Speakers: Tisha Chawla — Microsoft; Susheem Koul — Microsoft.