Manage Your GenAI Costs Before They Get Out of Control Gartner® Research

GenAI cost is emerging as one of the fastest-growing and least controlled areas of IT spend. Unlike cloud, where costs can be consistently estimated and controlled via policy, AI introduces continuous, usage-based and autonomous consumption that can scale rapidly without visibility. AI cost is fundamentally different: it is driven by system behavior and design, not infrastructure, requiring real-time control, engineering discipline and new economic strategies.

This creates real risk. Organizations are already facing cost spikes from inefficient architectures, uncontrolled experimentation and “headless” agent activity. However, it also creates opportunity for CIOs who act early and expose inefficiencies to establish economic discipline before ungoverned AI becomes business-critical or is impossible to undo once you understand how you want to govern it.

This shift requires CIOs to actively manage and improve return on GenAI spend (ROGS) by aligning cost, design and usage to measurable business value.

Read the research to see how: 

• AI cost is continuous, nonlinear and driven by system behavior and design.

• Without intervention, experimentation becomes structural cost drift.

• Cost optimization alone is insufficient; organizations must continuously improve return on GenAI spend as AI adoption scales.

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Gartner Reports: Gartner, Manage Your GenAI Costs Before They Get Out of Control, Robert Naegle and Ang Troy, 19 June2026.