Rippling has launched AI Spend Console after an internal push into heavy AI use showed the company was on track in March to spend 40% of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens, with spending rising 80% month over month. Chief Product Officer Matt MacInnis said the review found roughly 10-15% of employees were driving about 60% of total AI spend, and one engineer was spending $50,000 a month. The product combines spend dashboards with an AI gateway (software that routes prompts) designed to steer work toward cheaper models instead of defaulting to the newest frontier models (latest high-end AI systems), which Rippling said helped bring token spend down to about 15% of its headcount budget without reducing usage. MacInnis said Rippling hit a peak of 605 billion tokens in the month CFO Adam Swiecicki warned management, then used 600 billion tokens again in July, when the cost was 37% of April's token bill because prompts were being routed to more cost-effective models. The company is also using internal "AI captains" to improve adoption outside engineering, but says broader employee access may depend on proving that token consumption in G&A and customer-facing teams translates into measurable productivity.