Rippling built an AI-spending dashboard after burning through its budget on tokens

HR software provider Rippling this week unveiled AI Spend Console, a product that tracks and contains a company’s AI spending, mapping how much individual employees, teams, and roles are spending and whether that spending is translating into more productivity or more “AI slop.”

The tool followed a shock discovery. Chief Product Officer Matt MacInnis recalls an executive meeting in March when CFO Adam Swiecicki presented a number that stunned the team: Rippling was on track to burn 40% of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens — meaning it was spending as much on tokens as 40% of all the compensation it paid employees in that unit, millions of dollars — with spending growing 80% month-over-month. Had that trend continued, Rippling would have spent almost 90% as much on tokens the next year as it spent paying its R&D employees. An internal analysis found that roughly 10–15% of employees were driving about 60% of total AI spend, with one engineer alone spending $50,000 a month; much of the waste came from employees defaulting to the newest, most expensive frontier model for every task, whether or not it was needed.

Rippling didn’t want to cut AI usage, just rein it in. It negotiated spending caps with tools including Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and built its own AI gateway — now bundled into AI Spend Console — that routes prompts to the most cost-effective model for a given task. “The truth is that the inference providers, like Anthropic and OpenAI, have absolutely no incentives to help you control your spend,” MacInnis said, adding that they don’t give companies good usage insight or collaborate with one another.

The results: Rippling’s token spend fell from roughly 40% of its R&D headcount budget to about 15%, without cutting usage. The company hit a peak of 605 billion tokens the month Swiecicki issued his warning; by July, internal usage hit 600 billion tokens again, but cost just 37% of April’s token spend, MacInnis said, because usage is now routed to cheaper models.

AI Spend Console is included for Rippling’s HR subscribers, with additional usage-based costs, and can also be bought as a standalone product integrated with another company’s HR system of record.

Why it matters

Rippling’s numbers suggest 2026’s “tokenmaxxing” phase inside engineering orgs is giving way to a cost-discipline phase — and that the tools enterprises need next look less like chatbots and more like spend-management software wrapped around a model-routing gateway.