Esker now budgets AI like salary, per employee

Finance software maker Esker spent roughly four times what it had budgeted on AI this year, as usage climbed across the company and model providers shifted toward charging by consumption. Rather than absorb the surprise again, its finance chief has started treating AI as part of what each worker costs the business - sitting alongside salary, bonus and payroll tax on the ledger.

The method is deliberately mundane. Esker takes real usage data from its AI vendors, estimates how much each function consumes, and works out a monthly run-rate cost per employee it can project into next year. It turns out that spend is wildly uneven - a handful of teams, finance and R&D among them, run up most of the overage - which is precisely the kind of pattern a single invoice hides.

This is governance made concrete, and it mirrors how Uprovd approaches the problem. A cost you can attribute to an owner is a cost you can forecast, question and control; one that arrives as a lump sum is not. The company’s own survey underlines the stakes: most finance leaders overspent on AI last year, and roughly two-thirds still cannot connect that usage to a business outcome.