Corporate card and expense-management company Ramp has opened its internal AI-routing tool, Router, to outside customers, giving finance teams a single dashboard to track and control what a company spends on OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model providers. Router sends each request to whichever model meets a company’s cost and performance bar, rather than locking spend to one vendor’s pricing.
The move matters because AI token spend has quietly become a line item finance teams cannot see clearly, let alone manage the way they manage travel or software spend. Ramp’s own customers using the tool before its public release cut inference costs by an average of 40%, according to the company, simply by routing routine requests to cheaper models and reserving expensive ones for tasks that need them. For a corporate-card company, that is a natural extension of the expense-control mandate it already sells, now applied to a cost center that barely existed two years ago.
The more interesting signal is who else is chasing the same territory. Router launched free through 2026 into a field Ramp itself counts at roughly a dozen competitors, weeks after Stripe’s acquisition of OpenRouter put a multibillion-dollar price tag on model-routing infrastructure. Two payments-adjacent companies converging on the same plumbing in the same month suggests AI cost management is becoming table stakes for embedded finance platforms, not a side project, echoing how AI agents have moved from chat interfaces into finance’s operational middle.
“AI is the fastest-growing line item at most companies, and the one they can least measure,” said Rahul Sengottuvelu, Ramp’s chief technology officer, in the company’s August 19 announcement.
Source: Ramp
