Accelerate AI adoption with governance: Introducing Glean's AI usage controls
Ever since AI started catching on, the operating model in most enterprises has been to experiment, test new tools, and get as many people using AI as fast as possible. While teams celebrated tokenmaxxing as a sign of innovation, adoption, and a new way of working, CIOs still worried they weren’t moving fast enough.
In 2026, the conversation changed. Discussions shifted from adoption and experimentation to blown-through budgets, rogue behavior, and questions about how to achieve the same business goals while AI costs ballooned. These surprising costs and the inability to control them caused enterprises to hold back AI transformation—not because the technology wasn’t ready, but because the governance wasn't. Since many companies unintentionally overspent, they became more cautious about acquiring, implementing, and deploying AI tools at scale.
Glean makes affordable scalability and accelerated transformation possible through AI cost governance that provides teams with the oversight they need to move with confidence. Get comprehensive visibility paired with granular controls to minimize unexpected costs and scale AI more effectively.
Guardrails that hold while you securely scale usage
Most organizations end up governing AI reactively because the tools available to them aren’t enterprise-grade. In most AI experiences, you can either turn a capability off for everyone, or you can leave it on and hope that its usage doesn’t blow through your budget. The features and models that are the most powerful and most used, therefore, are actually the ones that have the greatest risk to your balance sheet.
Glean's usage limits are built for enterprise work and scale, and allow you to safely drive adoption. Limits can be set broadly for the entire organization, or individually for every user, agent, and specific team. Glean also provides the ability to set guardrails and access restrictions to models by departments or across your organization. A support team piloting a high-volume agent and a research team leveraging frontier models can operate under the same governance model with completely different access rules to models and usage ceilings.
With Glean, teams choose how they implement and deploy limits. Some teams might want to monitor usage signals, while others will want to block overconsumption. Glean supports both, so guardrails match intent instead of forcing every team into the strictest setting. Budget owners also get early warning as spend climbs toward a ceiling, well before it becomes a surprise.
From "who is spending" to "why they're spending"
Most cost dashboards tell you who is using AI, but they rarely tell you what they are using it for. You can see that a user consumed most of your allocated budget, but you can't see what drove their usage. Without understanding what drove the usage, you do not know how to prevent overspending from happening again or how to educate users on how their behaviors should change.
Glean is built to arm you with the understanding of the “why” behind the numbers. Glean’s Usage dashboard provides deep observability into usage details for departments and users, including the ability to diagnose which product surfaces drive department usage and triage how individual users use different models, agents, and products.
This top-down and bottom-up approach is essential to enforcing cost controls. As leaders set limits, users need to understand what drives their usage in case they approach the predefined threshold. Glean gives individuals a view of their own consumption and where it goes, which quietly changes behavior and allows them to make tradeoffs if needed.
Understanding how AI is used within your organization gives you a stronger ability to forecast future AI usage and budget. Given that each department is unique, having additional details on how AI is being used allows you to scale and protect your budget. Glean lets you forecast future usage, so consumption is predictable and never reactive.
The structural problem no single provider can solve
We built Glean’s AI usage controls around the same principle—that managing AI costs requires a control layer beneath the tools employees use, not another dashboard inside each one. In Glean, admins can see what drives spend and set limits across the organization, users, agents, teams, and models. But enterprise AI usage expands beyond Glean, and into other AI surfaces—each with its own models, controls, and bill.
That is why we expanded the same cost-governance foundation through Glean AI Gateway. AI Gateway sits between those AI surfaces and the models they use, bringing model access, token usage, attribution, and spend controls into one governed layer, regardless of which front door an employee walks through.
Scale AI with confidence
Without effective cost governance, organizations lose control of AI spend, face unexpected bills, and may be forced to deprioritize innovation. Managing AI costs is essential for scaling enterprise AI responsibly. With Glean’s AI usage controls, you can scale AI confidently without runaway costs. Set spending limits, understand usage, forecast demand, and manage AI across every surface from one centralized solution.
Check out the latest updates with Glean’s approach to cost governance by streaming our annual conference, Glean:GO, or scheduling a demo.
Generally available: Company-wide, user, department, and agent level usage limits; alert-only and hard-cap enforcement; department and user-level usage visibility; department-based and premium model governance
Beta: AI gateway
Coming soon: Usage requests and usage forecasting
