Token Economics Audit

The Token Economics Audit measures what your agent workloads cost per unit of work — a resolved ticket, a drafted document, a completed workflow step — and separates the spend that buys outcomes from the spend that buys nothing.

Cost per million tokens is the number on the invoice. It is also the wrong number. Token prices have fallen for two years while agent bills have risen, because the waste lives in the ratio: how many tokens a unit of work consumes, and how many of those tokens the model never needed. That ratio is invisible on the invoice and measurable in your telemetry, and the audit exists to measure it.

This is the entry diagnostic — deliberately small enough to approve without a steering committee, and concrete enough that the finding stands on its own whether or not you do anything further with us. The report states its methodology in full, including what it could not measure. A finance reviewer should be able to reproduce the arithmetic without calling us.

• The finance leader whose model spend doubled while measured output did not
• The AI or platform lead who suspects waste but cannot attribute it, and needs a defensible baseline before committing to a larger program
• Procurement teams sizing an enterprise commitment to a model provider and unwilling to anchor it on last quarter's unexamined usage
• Anyone who has been asked what one agent transaction costs us, in a meeting, and had to answer with the invoice total divided by a guess

Read-only ingestion of your usage telemetry. We build the workload inventory — every agent workflow that spends tokens — and agree the unit-of-work definitions with your team, because a unit chosen unilaterally by an auditor is a unit finance will reject.

Cost attributed per workload and per unit. Waste patterns identified and quantified. The report is drafted, reviewed with your team for factual accuracy — not for conclusions, those are ours — and delivered with a readout session.

• Retrieval overfetch — top-k padding pushed into context just in case, paid for on every call, read by the model almost never
• Retry loops — failed calls re-sent with full context attached, so one failure costs three successes
• Redundant fetching — step four of a pipeline retrieving what step two already retrieved, because no stage knows what another stage holds
• Unbounded history — conversation context growing linearly with session length, so the hundredth turn costs an order of magnitude more than the first
• Boilerplate ballast — instruction blocks and few-shot examples carried on every call, long after the workflow stopped needing them

None of these show on an invoice. All of them show in telemetry.

• A workload inventory with measured cost attribution — what each agent workflow costs per unit of work
• A waste analysis quantifying each pattern found in your estate
• A prioritized remediation list with modeled recovery, presented as ranges with assumptions stated — modeled from your own telemetry, and not guarantees
• A CFO-ready report with methodology in full, built to survive a finance review
• A clear go or no-go for the Assessment rung — including “your spend is fine; your problem is elsewhere”

Usage grew 20%; spend grew 110%. Nobody changed anything on purpose. Two weeks of telemetry work typically finds the growth living in two or three of the waste patterns above — and finds which workflow they live in, which is what makes remediation a task instead of a debate.

An enterprise agreement with a model provider is on the table, sized from current consumption. If a third of current consumption is buying nothing, the commitment is mis-sized by a third. The audit produces the baseline before the signature, not after.

An internal team reports a 40% cost reduction from a caching change and wants to scale it estate-wide. The audit verifies the claim against measured units of work before the pattern is replicated — because scaling a measurement error scales the error.

• It is not a quality or accuracy assessment. The audit tells you what spend buys nothing; it does not tell you whether the spend that buys something is buying the right thing. That is the Assessment's territory.
• It is not a procurement negotiation service. The report will strengthen your negotiating position; we do not sit at that table.
• It does not promise savings. When the honest finding is that your estate is efficient, that is the finding you get, and it is worth exactly as much.