The Cost Attribution Gap: Why Most AI Agent Teams Fly Blind on Spending

Most teams running AI agents watch a monthly bill grow without knowing which tasks are driving it. You see: $180 in API costs. You do not see: which of your 12 agent tasks costs $0.003 and which costs $0.47 — and whether either is worth it. This is the cost attribution gap. It is fixable in about 20 minutes. Why Per-Task Cost Visibility Matters When you only see aggregate costs, you make the wrong cuts. Real example: a team cut their "expensive" analysis agent — the one doing deep document review. That agent was costing $0.12/run and running 40 times a day: $4.80/day. Meanwhile their routing agent — which they assumed was cheap — was misconfigured and making 8 model calls per decision instead of 1. $0.38/run × 200 runs/day = $76/day. They killed the wrong agent. Per-task attribution would have surfaced this in the first week. The Two-Field Fix Add two fields to your current-task.json : { "task_id" : "summarize-inbox-001" , "task_type" : "inbox_summarization" , "started_at" : "2026-03-0