No One Owns AI Spend: Three Preconditions For Distributed Accountability

InnovationNo One Owns AI Spend: Three Preconditions For Distributed AccountabilityByUdam Dewaraja,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 11:15am EDTUdam Dewaraja - Founder & CEO of StitcherAI. Founded FOCUS, a finance standard adopted by thousands of enterprises. getty​The CFO asks about a cost overrun.The IT finance team didn't make the decision that caused it. It wasn't consulted. But it has to explain it. This scene plays out daily around technology spend, especially with AI costs rising exponentially. It’s a structural problem that no IT finance dashboard, training program or executive mandate has fixed.That's because the spending mechanism itself has changed. IT costs are no longer set centrally, in budget cycles. They accrue continuously, as developers provision cloud, teams adopt SaaS, business units roll out AI across their workflows and agent fleets trigger inference at machine speed. Each decision generates cost at a speed and volume no periodic review was designed to capture. By the time the impact surfaces, the feature is live and customers are using it. The IT finance team operates in hindsight: chasing cost overruns and investigating spikes that were locked in weeks before anyone noticed.Bottleneck And AntagonistThis does more than waste money. It spreads discord. The IT finance team becomes the bottleneck and the antagonist. Engineering and product see IT finance questioning decisions without understanding context. Meanwhile, IT finance has no time for higher-order work like enabling AI transformation. Instead, it is consumed by reactive firefighting. Leadership then questions why it's not more strategic.The longer this pattern holds, the harder it is to break. Gartner projects worldwide IT spending will surpass $6 trillion this year. Fast-growing categories a...