Attribution & Finance
Showback
The lighter cousin of chargeback: showing each team what it spent without moving the money. It creates visibility and accountability without the friction of internal billing.
Example
Every team lead gets a monthly email — "Your team used $4,800 of AI last month, up 30%." No budget transfer happens, but the number alone often triggers a "why is that up?" conversation that trims spend.
Related terms
Chargeback
Billing each internal team for the AI spend it actually caused, moving the cost onto that team's budget. It makes teams feel their own usage, which is the fastest way to curb waste.
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."
FinOps
The discipline of managing cloud (and now AI) spend as a shared, ongoing practice across engineering, finance, and product — bringing accountability to variable, usage-based costs. The FinOps Foundation maintains the standard framework.