Cost attribution
Cost attribution is the practice of assigning AI and cloud costs to the specific customer, feature, team, or workload that generated them, enabling accurate per-customer margin analysis, internal chargeback, and showback.
Why attribution has to happen below the vendor invoice
A vendor invoice tells a company its total spend for a period, but it does not by itself say which customer, feature, or team generated that spend. Cost attribution closes that gap by tagging usage events at the point they are metered — with a customer ID, a feature or product-line identifier, a team, or all three — so the aggregate vendor cost can be decomposed back down to the level a business actually needs to make pricing and margin decisions.
What accurate attribution enables
Reliable cost attribution is the prerequisite for measuring AI gross margin per customer or per product line, for catching margin leakage before it compounds across a portfolio, and for internal chargeback or showback that holds engineering and product teams accountable for the AI cost their features generate. Without it, margin figures are only accurate in aggregate and can hide badly unprofitable customers or features behind healthier ones.