Recently, as companies strive to balance budgets under sustained economic pressure, the cost of AI tokens (i.e., the AI processing capacity that companies purchase) has come under increasing scrutiny. BlackLine CFO Patrick Villanova said such pricing models can be favorable to vendors because "the cap on charges can be infinitely high."

"But for a finance professional like me, this is extremely challenging—we need to be accountable for budgets, we need predictability, we need clear visibility, and we must see a return on every investment," Villanova said in an interview with CFO Dive.

Pursuing "outcomes" rather than "tokens"

The cost issues arising from token-based billing models have sparked growing dissatisfaction among corporate executives—especially finance leaders, who need to record expenses accurately and transparently and are increasingly being asked to demonstrate thereturn on investment。

Villanova noted that conversations with other finance leaders show that the lack of predictability in token billing is a particularly prominent pain point. "You need predictability, you need clear visibility," he said. "Whether it's me or other finance executives, they all want to understand: what benefits can this technology bring to the business, and link it to key business metrics."

Employees may consume tokens by trying new code iterations, generating new images or copy, causing costs to surge. For example, ride-hailing company Uber exhausted itsAI token budget for all of 2026within just a few months, and subsequently implemented a monthly usage cap of $1,500 per tool to control costs, according to Fortune and Bloomberg reports.

Villanova, a veteran based in Woodland Hills, California, has been with BlackLine for 10 years. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has served as BlackLine's CFO since March 2025, previously held the role of Chief Accounting Officer for six years, and before that spent 16 years at Big Four accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

BlackLine is an intelligent financial operations platform offering products such as account reconciliation, journal entries, and compliance. Villanova said the company offers "outcome-based" rather than "token-based" pricing. Customers do not purchase a specific number of tokens but rather "outcomes," such as the number of reconciliations they want automated.

BlackLine itself still needs to purchase tokens, which means the company must be "very, very careful to ensure that the price we get here justifies the token consumption rate there," he said.

Villanova said he applies the same outcome-oriented approach when evaluating internal solutions. "When a budget owner or another executive comes to me and says 'I need X dollars to buy this AI product,' my first reaction is: 'Okay, what outcome do you expect?' Then I'll say: 'Let's not talk about cost first; what is your goal?'"

Prioritizing transparency

In the finance and accounting space, AI costs have not necessarily led CFOs or finance teams to abandon technology experimentation, but Villanova noted that this is especially because "AI adoption in finance is intentionally slowing down."

The finance industry is regulated and must report data to bodies such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), while also facing internal audits. "What they need to see is that this must be a glass box, not a black box," he said.

"You must have absolute transparency into what the AI is doing," Villanova said, "must have absolute transparency into the decisions it makes and why, and if it makes autonomous decisions or exercises judgment, there must be a very clear audit trail."

As the need for transparency and predictability grows, Villanova predicts that "outcome-based" pricing models will become more common. User-based pricing "is going extinct," Villanova said. "This has been going on for years, because the more efficient you are, the fewer licenses you need. It's a bit of a paradox: the better you use the product, the lower the cost, because fewer users need to use it."

He added that this trend will only accelerate with the continued introduction of AI. "There will be fewer and fewer accountants and finance professionals doing these repetitive tasks; we are automating them with agents, so now we have to say: look, a fixed annual fee."