[btown]

On top of this, there's a vast difference between "what do you mean that team spent $1000 on AI in their expense report, what did we get for that?" vs. "oh, the company-wide AWS bill went up by a few percent, let's look into that when we have time." The latter makes projects far more viable.

[cubefox]

But note that this difference is the result of bad accounting.

[dragonwriter]

Well, as framed its bad accounting.

OTOH, the other form is that instead of generic AI spend going up it is total spending for a particular AWS account within the umbrella of the firms AWS organization, so that the spending is attributed to a specific project whose use case, other costs, and (presumably) benefit and/or revenue can be considered.

Of course, if your AWS stuff is just one undifferentiated bucket, that’s a problem, but AFAICT AWS (like GCP) is much better set up for tracking use and costs by project than OpenAI (or Anthropic), because its an enterprise cloud provider where fitting into how large organizations track things at multiple levels is as much a core competency as any technical feature, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic are AI technology providers that are much less mature as enterprise vendors.