Attribution & Finance
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.
Example
Your AI support feature costs $0.14 in tokens per ticket resolved. If you charge customers a plan that nets $0.10 of margin per ticket, the feature loses money on every heavy user — a unit-economics problem you want to catch before you have a million of them.
Related terms
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.
Run-rate
Your current spend projected forward over a full period, usually annualized, to answer "if today's pace held, what would this cost us for the year?"
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.