FinOps for AI Agents: Who Spent All the Tokens? — Tisha Chawla & Susheem Koul, Microsoft
Aug 22, 2026 · 21:24
Microsoft engineers Tisha Chawla and Susheem Koul present TokenOps, a runaway token governance control plane for AI agents, arguing the agentic era's missing control surface sits between code and model calls, not at request-level gateways. The design has an out-of-band SDK with boundary annotations, a ledger, and a governor, plus a control plane that groups runs into segments, sets budgets, and applies policies. Enforcement comes in two flavors: halt is a circuit breaker, while steer uses a cost guard that watches budget consumed and token velocity and, predicting an overrun, injects an instruction to keep outputs succinct instead of killing the run. They show preview mode with enforcement off, then enforced halt and steering. Benchmarked on Browser Use and MetaGPT, the full policy suite cut average agent spend by about 78% and lifted run completion from 67% to roughly 96% versus throttling.
