After Rippling blew millions on AI in months, it built an employee ROI tool

Why it matters

Rippling, the HR software provider, has launched AI Spend Console, a product born from an internal crisis: unchecked spending on AI tokens had grown so large that it rivaled a substantial share of what the company paid its research and development staff. Chief Product Officer Matt MacInnis described the discovery as shocking, prompting an urgent effort to understand what the company was getting for its money. The tool tracks spending by employee, team, and role, links that spending to work output, and includes a gateway that routes prompts to cheaper, suitable models rather than defaulting to expensive frontier options. MacInnis criticized inference providers for lacking incentives to help customers control costs. Rippling says it sharply cut token costs while usage stayed high, aided by internal champions it calls AI captains. The product ships with Rippling's HR suite and is sold separately. The broader implication is that open-ended employee AI access may give way to measured, productivity-linked usage.