Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What this guide covers This is for teams shipping an AI feature to more than one paying customer, where the model calls happen inside your own application rather than being billed directly to the customer's provider account. It assumes you have agents — multi-step runs with tool calls — rather than a single request-response, because that is where naive accounting falls apart fastest. The guide covers the schema, the instrumentation using the OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions, the propagation problems that cause silent gaps, the maths of turning tokens into money correctly, and the four reports that justify the whole exercise. It is deliberately implementation-level; the strategic case for unit economics is covered separately in our guide to cost per task and margin. Why agents make…
