Most coverage of the $500M story stops at the seven levers above — treat them as a tactical checklist, fix the config, move on. That's the engineering answer, and it's incomplete.
The deeper point is that AI cost is a governance control, not a billing footnote. The same organizational muscle that governs who can access what data, which models are approved for which risk tier, and how AI decisions are audited is the muscle that governs spend. They are the same control plane. A company that has thought seriously about AI governance does not produce a surprise half-billion-dollar invoice, because spend visibility falls out of the governance work automatically.
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