# Kong Gateway’s 5-Step Framework for AI Cost Management

This presentation explains how Kong’s AI gateway and cost management capabilities help organizations track, control, and optimize AI spending across models and providers. It shows how teams can define granular budgets for departments or individual users, attach actions such as notifications or hard blocks at specific thresholds, and send alerts through email, Slack, or webhooks to trigger external systems. Beyond budgets, it highlights anomaly detection for issues like rate spikes, baseline deviations, unbudgeted spenders, unattended agent loops, and rising transaction failures so costly problems can be caught early. The dashboard then rolls spending up into a shared view for finance and engineering, showing actual spend, projected overruns, budgets at risk, blocked users, high-cost teams, repositories, and models, while also surfacing savings from prompt caching and complexity-based routing. In the Q&A, the speaker adds that attribution relies on Kong Identity to map activity to a user or agent principle and distinguishes internal cost control from OpenMeter’s external metering and billing use case.