HR software company Rippling found itself on track to spend 40% of its research and development headcount budget on AI tokens, with spending growing 80% month over month, TechCrunch reported.
The distribution was lopsided. About 10% to 15% of employees drove 60% of total AI spending, and one engineer was burning $50,000 a month, according to TechCrunch.
"The truth is that the inference providers, like Anthropic and OpenAI, have absolutely no incentives to help you control your spend," said Matt MacInnis, Rippling's chief product officer.
This week the company released AI Spend Console, the internal tool it built in response, as a product. It tracks individual and team AI spending against productivity signals, flags work that repeatedly needs rework and routes requests to cheaper models when they will do the job. It ships with Rippling's HR subscriptions and as standalone software.
Rippling said the tool cut its own token bill from 40% to 15% of headcount budget at similar usage: 605 billion tokens in its peak month against 600 billion in July, with July costing 37% of what April did.
AI spend management is quickly becoming its own budget line, and vendors from cloud cost tools to HR platforms are racing to own it.