What an LLM Cost Audit Should Measure

A serious LLM cost audit starts with usage, not opinions. Teams need to know which workflows are calling which models, how many tokens each path consumes, how often prompts repeat, and whether those calls require frontier reasoning at all.

The next layer is quality segmentation. Some tasks need the strongest available model. Many do not. Classification, summarization, extraction, routing, draft generation, and internal search often have lower-cost paths if the organization can measure quality with a repeatable eval.

The final layer is ownership. Token spend is rarely just an engineering line item. Finance needs cost centers, platform teams need policies, and product teams need latency and quality tradeoffs they can trust. Without that governance layer, savings do not stick.