Attribution & Finance
Cost per successful task
Spend divided by successful outcomes, not by calls or tokens. It's the metric that reveals whether AI is actually efficient, because a cheap call that fails and gets retried three times is not cheap.
Example
An agent completes 1,000 tasks a day and costs $200 — but 400 of those "completions" failed and had to be redone. Cost per successful task is $200 ÷ 600 = $0.33, not the $0.20 the raw math suggests. Optimizing the failures is where the money is.
Related terms
Unit economics
The cost of AI to serve one unit of your business — one customer, one transaction, one support ticket — so you can tell whether a feature makes or loses money as it scales.
Cost attribution
Tying each dollar of AI spend to who spent it and why — the person, team, project, or agent responsible — rather than seeing one lump sum on a provider invoice. Attribution is the difference between "we spent $40,000 on AI" and "the research team's document pipeline spent $40,000."
AI agent
An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal over multiple steps — planning, calling tools, reacting to results, and looping until done. Because an agent can make many calls per task, it can spend far more than a single prompt, and it spends without a human watching each step.