How do I budget for this — CapEx or OpEx, which cost centre, and what stops the number creeping the way our cloud bill did?

The full executive answer

Classification is clean: pure operating expense. There is no perpetual licence, no owned asset, no implementation build that would tempt anyone toward capitalisation — a subscription service expensed in the period, which most CFOs now prefer anyway for the flexibility it preserves. Cost centre in practice: corporate development, strategy office, or the CEO’s office for the core subscription; if you enable the business-unit chargeback feature, divisional consumption can be attributed and internally recharged to each unit’s own P&L, giving you consumption-follows-benefit allocation without manual journal work.

On creep — the cloud-bill trauma is exactly the failure mode we engineered against, because AI billing elsewhere is usually an uncapped meter. Here the subscription is flat, each tier includes a defined AI-usage allowance, and above that you have controls, not surprises: an organisation-level monthly cap you set, per-module caps beneath it, and alert thresholds that email finance at a percentage you choose before anything hits a limit — green, amber, red states visible on a cost dashboard that shows spend by module, by business unit and by engine, down to individual generation events. In COSO internal-control terms, that is a preventive control plus a detective control on the same spend line, owned by you rather than by our sales team’s upsell motion.

The number creeps only when you choose it to: adding seats or moving up a tier is an explicit commercial decision at published prices — $149, $649, $1,799, Enterprise from $9,000 — not a metered drift you discover at quarter-end.