By Pratyusha Duvvuri,
Publication Date: 2026-10-14 13:00:00
Pratyusha Duvvuri is a Technical Lead on Cisco’s AI Engineering team, designing tokenomics and observability architectures that help enterprise teams scale AI usage with clarity and accountability.
In the previous blog, we showed how tokenomics became essential to managing AI spend at scale. Here’s how we operationalized it by building for the humans who actually use it.
The challenges of AI spend visibility
As AI adoption accelerated across Cisco, our spend visibility became critical. We needed a clearer view of where spend was going and who was driving AI adoption with finance control, budget accountability, and fewer surprises as usage grew. Across the company, usage was expanding — from developers using AI coding assistants to thousands of employees interacting with internal platforms, multi-provider API gateways, and on-premises GPU clusters. Costs were growing across multiple environments, and while we could see budgets being consumed quickly, we could not see…