From the perspective of a financial executive evaluating the implementation of AI agents, the first thought that often comes to mind is not "how much can efficiency be improved," but rather a single concern: this thing might get out of control.

The reason is simple. Once AI agents start handling business tasks for the team, their spending logic is completely opposite to that of humans—high frequency, small and scattered expenses, billed based on usage; they will simultaneously call multiple tools, data sources, and cloud services; to improve success rates, they will keep trying, retrying, and switching strategies. If these costs are directly lumped into existing departmental expenses or company credit card bills, it may seem to save trouble on the surface, but in reality, it buries a financial governance mine—chaotic expense categorization, blurred responsibility chains, rolling budget forecasts going off track, and skyrocketing audit sampling costs.

In fact, the CFO’s way to break through is even more straightforward: proactively recognize that it is a new cost center and allocate a dedicated budget for AI agents. This is not about letting it spend recklessly; on the contrary, it is about bringing a new, unfamiliar expense type into a controllable budget framework.

Regarding budget planning, CFOs are most troubled by "unpredictability." Traditional costs are easy to budget because most expenses are either fixed in structure (office leasing, team salaries, annual system fees) or controlled through approval processes (procurement procedures, contract cycles, vendor payment terms).

AI agent expenses follow a completely different logic: highly flexible, and they will also undergo structural adjustments depending on business strategies, model choices, and tool combinations. Today, using a certain data API, next week discovering a cheaper alternative and switching; today running inference tasks in the cloud, next month testing the cost efficiency of edge nodes; today advertising on platform A, tomorrow trying platform B to improve conversions—these expenses are not just about the amount but also about the composition of costs themselves. This presents a real challenge to traditional budget management systems.