After burning millions on AI in months, Rippling built a tool to measure if it actually pays off
HR software company Rippling launched AI Spend Console, a tool that tracks employee AI spending and checks whether it translates into real productivity gains. The product followed an internal discovery that the company was on pace to spend nearly as much on AI tokens as on much of its engineering payroll.
HR software provider Rippling has introduced AI Spend Console, a product designed to help companies track and control how much money employees are spending on AI tools — and whether that spending is actually boosting output or just generating low-quality work that colleagues then have to redo.
A number that shocked leadership
The tool emerged after Rippling embraced heavy AI usage at the start of the year. In March, the company's CFO told executives that Rippling was on track to spend 40% of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens — millions of dollars — with spending growing 80% month-over-month. Left unchecked, the company projected it would soon be spending nearly as much on AI tokens as on the salaries of its R&D staff.
An internal review found that roughly 10-15% of employees accounted for about 60% of total AI spending, with one engineer alone spending $50,000 in a single month.
Cutting cost without cutting usage
Rather than restrict AI use, Rippling set out to make it more efficient. It first negotiated spending caps with providers including Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and discovered that employees were defaulting to the newest, most expensive models for every task regardless of complexity.
The company then built its own AI gateway to automatically route requests to the most cost-effective suitable model. That approach cut AI spending from 40% to about 15% of the R&D budget without reducing usage — by July, token consumption matched April's peak, but the cost was only 37% of what it had been in April.
Rippling also designated internal "AI captains," employees skilled at using AI effectively, to help train colleagues across the company. AI Spend Console is bundled with Rippling's HR subscription, with additional usage-based costs, and can also be purchased separately and integrated with other HR systems.
