What is AI Cost Attribution?

AI cost attribution is the practice of assigning every unit of AI spend — tokens, API calls, subscriptions — to the user, team, project, or workflow that generated it. It is the difference between an AI invoice and an AI budget.

Providers bill by account, not by business unit. Without attribution, finance cannot allocate cost, compare team efficiency, or evaluate whether an AI use case pays for itself.

Attribution requires capturing usage at the point of traffic with identity attached, then rolling it up by any dimension: team, model, provider, application, use case.

Tokto attributes AI spend at runtime as part of its FinOps control layer: every dollar traced, budgets enforced before overruns instead of explained after.