The same tools and services that are being deployed to secure AI usage may also provide the visibility needed to manage AI spending, solution provider experts tell CRN.
The cybersecurity tools and services that are now being deployed to protect increasing AI usage may also provide the visibility needed to bring AI spending under control, solution and service provider experts told CRN.
Helping customers to understand—and rein in—their LLM-related costs has emerged as a hugely valuable, additional benefit of putting AI security controls in place, according to Rocky Giglio, founder and CEO at Columbia, S.C.-based Cloud Security Pros.
“By taking this approach of, ‘Let’s think about control around these [AI technologies],’ we accidentally end up with visibility into what’s running and what it costs you,” Giglio said.
Crucially, the opportunity for solution and service providers is to assist with controlling consumption-based spending on AI tokens as well as subscription costs for AI platforms, experts said.
For instance, businesses may have purchased Microsoft Copilot licenses, while employees separately subscribe to Anthropic Claude and developers purchase API tokens, according to Giglio. The result, for many organizations, is AI “running all over the place,” he said—resulting in AI expenses that can be tough to track effectively.
At the same time, making a determination on where those tools are running and what they are doing—which happens to be a key necessity for securing AI—can also uncover opportunities to reduce that AI spending, Giglio told CRN.
The opportunity, he said, is being able to tell customers, “‘Hey, we could save you $100,000 a month by putting some controls in place—putting up some firewall rules, blocking some [usage], creating some policies, doing some user training.’”
The approach notably includes helping users understand how they can accomplish their work within the boundaries of the company’s controls, he said. “That’s been a really effective service for us,” Giglio said.
Presidio, No. 26 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500, has made a similar connection between security and governance of AI usage and gaining an understanding of AI costs, according to Chris Cagnazzi, chief innovation officer at New York-based Presidio.
AI security work for customers at the major solution provider includes establishment of guardrails around usage of AI—including prompts and data flows—as well as providing critical security for the identities associated with agents, Cagnazzi said.
Presidio is also working to address the cost side of AI usage, including through tapping into its prior experience of building a cloud cost management platform called PRISM, he said.
The starting point for Presidio in helping to limit AI spending is working to achieve a better understanding of the usage across a customer’s various AI systems, according to Cagnazzi.
“First, we need a visibility tool,” he said. “And then, how do we then provide not only visibility, but actionable items that come out of that visibility? Because I think that’s where customers struggle, and will continue to struggle, for a good period of time.”
Presidio has thus “developed a visibility platform [where] it doesn’t matter what tool you’re using,” Cagnazzi said. “We get by user how much they’re spending across the board.”
All in all, “we do think that it’s an area that customers have to focus on,” he said. “And we’ll continue to look around that cost optimization of the tokens and the spend.”
Tech giant Microsoft, meanwhile, is also offering an example of how token visibility and security can go hand-in-hand with its recently launched Project Perception agentic security system, according to Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for threat protection at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft.
The system brings together frontier AI models with specialized models for cybersecurity, with the ability to select among the models based on factors that include performance and speed—as well as cost.
With Project Perception, “a front-running tenet [is] to make sure that we give really clear visibility on where tokens are being spent and the ability to control and guide that,” Lefferts said.
