Rippling unveils AI Spend Console to track and cap employee AI tool spending

Rippling, an HR software provider, launched AI Spend Console, a product designed to track and cap employee AI spending across tools such as Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The tool maps spending by individual employees, teams, and roles, and aims to distinguish productive usage from wasteful output, such as code that peers must repeatedly redo during reviews.

The product was created after Rippling’s leadership discovered its own AI spending had reached unsustainable levels. In March, the company’s CFO presented data showing the company was on track to spend 90% of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens for the year, up from 40% at the time. Spending had been growing by 80% month-over-month, and executives described the revelation as shocking.

Rippling’s analysis found that roughly 10–15% of employees were driving about 60% of total AI spend, with one engineer spending $50,000 per month. To address the issue, the company negotiated spending caps with its AI tool providers and built an AI gateway to route prompts to the most cost-effective models for each task. Rippling noted that providers like Anthropic and OpenAI have little incentive to help control customer spending, as their revenue grows with usage.

Using the new tool and gateway, Rippling reduced its token spend from 40% of its R&D headcount budget to about 15%, while maintaining high internal AI usage. In April, the company used 605 billion tokens at peak spending; by July, it used roughly the same volume of tokens but at 37% of the cost, due to routing to more cost-effective models.

AI Spend Console includes dashboards that score attributes such as prompts per day, work output (e.g., lines of code or pull requests), and spending. Rippling also appointed “AI captains” among effective users to help guide colleagues, though the company acknowledges that measuring productivity outside engineering remains a work in progress.

The product is included for Rippling’s HR subscribers, with additional costs tied to AI usage. It can also be purchased as a standalone product and integrated with another HR system of record, according to Rippling’s Chief Product Officer Matt MacInnis.