Beyond AI cost visibility: Designing tokenomics for real users

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. 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. Employees were trying new coding tools, teams were finding new ways to use them, and costs were growing across several providers. We could see budgets being consumed quickly, but we could not see the full story behind that spend. This is why tokenomics is a key priority for us at Cisco, and why being customer zero for Splunk Agent Observability is so impactful. To…