Rippling launches tool to combat runaway AI spending by enterprise teams

HR software provider Rippling has unveiled AI Spend Console, a tool designed to help companies track and control their artificial intelligence expenditure. The product reveals which employees, teams, and roles are driving AI spending and whether they're actually delivering higher productivity or simply generating excess outputs. Rippling developed the tool after its own internal spending spiraled to unsustainable levels. In March, the company discovered it was on track to spend 40% of its R&D budget on AI tokens—equivalent to the compensation it paid to the entire engineering workforce. Monthly spending was growing 80% month-over-month. An analysis revealed approximately 10-15% of employees were responsible for 60% of total AI spending, with one engineer spending $50,000 monthly. The company's solution included negotiating spending caps with tools like Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and routing prompts to the most cost-effective models for each task. Rippling discovered that alternative models like Z.ai's GLM 5.2 delivered nearly identical performance to frontier models at 85% lower cost, reflecting a broader enterprise trend toward multi-model strategies.