Why No One Agrees on What Their AI Tokens Cost - Pratyusha Duvvuri, Cisco
Source
youtube.com
Author
AI Engineer
Date
Why it matters
Explains why provider dashboards fall short for per-person and per-team token cost attribution and what to track, including forecasting and handling bills that change after the fact.
Key takeaways · AI-distilled
Pratyusha Duvvuri asked about 100 companies what tokenomics means and got 100 different answers. Her definition: observability and interpretability of tokenThe chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.Full definition → usage and cost.
Her team took a tokenomics dashboard from first customer call to general availability in 10 weeks, covering spend by person and team, adoption trends, forecasting and a separate finance view.
Duvvuri names the hard parts of building it: providers with custom pricing, and bills that change after the fact.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
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