Your Inference Chargeback Is Quietly Taxing Eval Discipline
The FinOps team rolled out chargeback for AI a year ago. The dashboard is gorgeous. Every feature team can see, to the cent, what their inference bill was last month, and the platform PM has slides showing line-of-business attribution at the SKU level. The org has more AI features than it had a year ago. It also has worse AI quality. Nobody has connected the two facts yet, but they are the same fact.
Here is the failure mode in one sentence: chargeback prices the inference token and silently fails to price the eval token, so every PM on the org chart faces an incentive structure that rewards model upgrades and punishes evaluation discipline. Twelve months later, eval coverage is shrinking while the bill is growing — the precise opposite of what the FinOps initiative thought it was incentivizing. This is not a bug in the dashboard. It is the chargeback model functioning exactly as designed, in a domain where the design assumptions from cloud-cost FinOps no longer hold.
