Wanted: Token spend control and governance without slowing down agentic AI innovation

Scary AI spend and weak access security controls are the flipside of the sharp rise in agentic AI .

The answer lies in the form of a control plane that provides the visibility CIOs need.

The past couple of years have seen enterprises press the fast-forward button on generative AI strategies. e have all seen a remarkable change in deployment patterns from useful chatbots to autonomous agents that engage deeply with core software, data and LLMs, and even create their own offspring agents.

CIOs and others are rightly excited about the capacity of agentic AI to reduce manual processes and accelerate speed to insight and actions.

However, governance and AI token costs are alarming challenges.

What’s needed today then is the power of AI without the major concerns over incurring access control risks relating to ‘Shadow AI’ and agent sprawl, and without the ‘bill shock’ relating to unmanaged token consumption.

Moving fast The generative AI shift that has occurred so quickly spans the early days of ad hoc AI experimentation via testing and pilots to today’s enterprise-grade business processes.

It has also outpaced the progress of the usual governance frameworks and effectively rendered them obsolete.

Experienced CIOs may compare the change to the early days of cloud computing platforms when staff with credit cards expensed the AWS trials they had spun up and quickly ran up staggering bills.

Or they may hark back to the days when sales leaders set up online CRM platforms or other process owners bypassed IT to run their own Sharepoint systems.

Or, to reach for yet another lesson from history, they may compare what is happening with generative AI now with the advent of bring-your-own-device schemes and WiFi.

Remember when the user-led demand to have the shiny new gadget ran a coach and horses through the command-and-control IT regimes of cloned PCs stamped with a single image and CIOs no longer managed everything that touched their systems? The problem is here.

Deal with it However we make the comparison, it’s clear that today there are very real risks relating to data leakage, compliance standards and IT costs because of the speed with which AI has advanced.

Nobody wants to lose a chance to gain a competitive advantage and even to fundamentally re-engineer and automate expensive, error-strewn manual processes.