CloudZero launches AI Signals to put finance leaders back in control of AI spend

AI Signals categorizes AI spend in real time by person, team, and work done, turning an unexplainable line item into a number leaders can forecast and defend.

BOSTON, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- CloudZero, The AI ROI Company, today launched AI Signals, a new solution for AI cost and usage that shows finance and AI transformation leaders what their AI spending actually bought, across every model and provider.

AI adoption has moved well beyond engineering into sales, marketing, finance, and support, and executives are under pressure to keep investing. But spend keeps climbing while the reporting stays shallow, leaving leaders unable to say what any of it produced. The default reaction has been to put spend caps on AI, which limits exposure to overspending, but also caps the innovation AI was meant to deliver in the first place.

AI Signals captures events the moment they happen and categorizes spend by person, team, and work done, replacing a total nobody can explain with spend a leader can trace to the work behind it.

AI Signals includes a new Overview dashboard that shows leaders what their AI spending is going toward and the work it paid for. It goes beyond reporting on which team or model to describe the work itself, showing whether the money went to prospecting, code review, content drafting, or one of 35+ other business activities. A second new capability, Monitors, alerts teams when AI consumption breaks pattern and names the people and the work behind it, so leaders can fund what's producing and stop what isn't.

Together, the new capabilities bring AI spend into full resolution and answer a question most companies cannot answer today: who is spending on AI, on which models, on what work, and what did we get for it?

As AI spending has moved beyond engineering, cost data arrives without the resource tags, cloud accounts, and service-to-team mappings companies use to allocate engineering spend. Wharton's 2025 AI adoption report puts weekly gen AI use among enterprise leaders at 82%, with adoption spreading past IT into HR, finance, and legal. McKinsey found AI spend rises nearly fourfold as companies scale beyond isolated use cases, and that 93% of organizations already exceed their AI budgets.

Every available way to manage that growth also slows the teams producing the most with AI.

"Finance leaders are now designating AI champions, the people who want to enable good work and catch the expensive mistakes while they're still small," said Scott Castle, Chief Product Officer at CloudZero. "Right now that person is working with an invoice and a list of seats, keys and tokens. Collecting AI cost data is table stakes. Knowing which team spent the money, and on what work, within minutes, is what turns a token count into a number someone can be held to. It gives that champion the evidence to back their people, and the confidence to defend the spend that's working."

The new capabilities join two additional AI Signals views: Livestream for every inference call as it happens, and AI Explorer for estimated spend before the invoice arrives.

AI Signals Overview

The new AI Signals Overview page consolidates spend across providers, models, and departments into one view:

• Spend ranked by cost, by department, person, or repo. One data set answers three questions: which departments are spending, which individuals are driving it, and which repos it traces back to.
• Activity categorization. AI spend resolves into the work it paid for, across 35+ familiar business activities: prospecting and account research in sales, code review and debugging in engineering, content drafting and campaign analysis in marketing.
• Which models each department is using. It tracks how the mix is shifting over time, what caching is saving on each model, and cost against token consumption, so you can spot when a model swap is driving spend.

Monitors

Monitors watches AI consumption continuously and surfaces spend that does not fit the pattern, with the cause attached. Teams set their own thresholds, so alerts reflect what a specific business cares about. Rather than simply reporting that consumption increased, an alert reads:

• "Back-end engineering's spend on Claude Sonnet is up 3.4x week over week, driven by four engineers, mostly on test generation."
• "Marketing spent $900 on GPT-5 this week on content drafting, six times its trailing average."

Alerts arrive by email or Slack, so the person accountable sees them without logging in. Monitors can also open and track an incident with the team, the people, and the activity already categorized, so teams begin with the diagnosis rather than spending the first hour assembling it.

"AI was the most evasive line in my forecast," said Dan Carducci, VP of Finance at CloudZero. "I could tell you what we spent last month, but not what drove it or how to project the next period. Now I can see the context behind the spend and which team did it, which means I can forecast the line instead of guessing at it."

Privacy and deployment

AI Signals is built around a privacy-by-design architecture. Usage data is consolidated and enriched from within the customer's own environment and no prompt or session data ever leaves the customer's VPC.

The launch also broadens support for multiple inference providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Vertex and Gemini, AWS Bedrock, and Fireworks; gateways and proxies including LiteLLM and Bifrost; and direct OpenTelemetry.

AI Signals, including Overview and Monitors, is available today. See a demonstration of these capabilities or request a demo at https://www.cloudzero.com/go/ai-signals/.

About CloudZero

CloudZero is The AI ROI Company, delivering the financial control plane purpose-built for the way AI actually generates cost. Multi-dimensional allocation captures every AI interaction the moment it happens and connects it to the customer, product, and feature that drove it, giving finance, operations, and engineering leaders a shared view of cost per customer, product, feature, team, person, and activity in real time. AI Hub embeds that intelligence directly into the agentic workflows engineering teams already use. Trusted by leaders like Coinbase, Klaviyo, Miro, Nubank, and Rapid7, CloudZero is how modern companies turn AI spending into business intelligence.

SOURCE CloudZero