No One Owns AI Spend: Three Preconditions For Distributed Accountability

AI cost accrual now happens continuously, not in budget cycles. Developers provision cloud, teams adopt SaaS, and business units deploy AI workflows with real-time inference, generating costs at machine speed. These decisions lock in spending weeks before any review. IT finance teams operate in hindsight, chasing overruns and investigating spikes that were already embedded. This creates discord, makes IT finance a bottleneck, and undermines trust. Without distributed accountability, spending becomes opaque and unmanageable. The structural shift demands new governance models that track costs as they happen, not after the fact. This is critical for engineering and product teams to maintain transparency and control over AI-driven expenditures.