Map usage before you commission another cost dashboard
A polished spend chart on untagged AI calls only accelerates the wrong debate.
Teams under pressure often skip attribution fields and jump to a new cost board. Weeks later, product and finance argue over different totals for the same model because every call still shares one opaque key.
Prefer feature and tenant tags over UI widget names. Keep environment out of the endpoint alias and in a property. Write allowed values the same day a new AI path ships—or the path becomes a free-form dump.
In an AI Cloud Usage Audit we spend early days on the inventory, not on chart cosmetics. Dashboards get sharper only after the usage map stops arguing with itself.