AI costs have been the talk of tech news this year. Companies have been blowing through their annual AI budgets in just months with token spend out of control. Plus, when these finances and IT teams are trying to audit their token spending, and no one actually knows who is using all these tokens, or where they are using them.
Whether it’s a developer using Claude for code or a program manager using ChatGPT to plan out their schedule, token use can be happening everywhere and from anyone, creating budget chaos along with user and system confusion. In fact, a recent survey of 500 Finance leaders at large US and UK organizations found that 79% of them had overrun AI costs over the last year.
The thing is, many organizations are treating their AI budgets the same way they treat their software budgets, and AI costs cannot be forecasted the same way software can. AI spend is more structurally volatile and nonlinear.
Omni Gateway: A control plane for your AI spend
To tame this volatility, organizations need a central control plane and unified dashboard to see who is using what, and where, when it comes to the various AI systems and users.
This is where Salesforce enters the picture. By offering a comprehensive, top-down strategy, Salesforce provides organizations with enterprise-wide AI governance to give leadership the policies and visibility they need to keep costs and data secure. But how do you actually enforce those policies at the ground level where the code meets the road?
That’s where the technical muscle comes in. MuleSoft Omni Gateway acts as a unified entry point for every AI request across your entire enterprise. Instead of developers and teams connecting directly to the many LLM providers out there, all AI traffic routes through a single, secure gateway.
This gives your FinOps and IT teams a single dashboard to track token spend by team, application, and business group. You get instant, granular visibility into exactly who is using what, resolving the shadow AI blindspot and providing the precise data needed for accurate internal chargebacks.
Stop overages at the Gateway with proactive cost control
Visibility may be the first issue, but it’s only half the battle; real-time intervention to stop token overages before they start is what saves the budget.
Omni Gateway allows teams to transition from reactive auditing to proactive prevention by enforcing strict, token-based rate limits and throttling directly at the gateway layer. Because it sits between your users and the AI models, the gateway can physically block or queue requests the moment a team or application hits its allocated token budget. This prevents runaway loops, unoptimized prompt spikes, or rogue applications from draining your entire annual budget in a single weekend.
Intelligent routing and caching for automatic optimization
Beyond simple limits, Omni Gateway drives down the baseline cost of AI through automated efficiency. Through intelligent routing, direct user prompts are automatically routed to the most cost-effective model capable of handling the task – saving expensive reasoning models only for the most complex queries.
Additionally, by utilizing semantic caching, the gateway can recognize repeat queries and instantly serve up previously cached AI responses without pinging the LLM again. This significantly reduces overall token consumption and lowers latency, proving that cost management doesn’t have to come at the expense of developer speed or user experience.
The big picture of your AI spend
Learn more about Smart Tokenomics and MuleSoft’s resources for cost management, and reach out to your account team for more information. We can help you map out the fastest, easiest way to get a handle on your AI spending and budget today.
