Request-Level Cost Attribution: The Missing Foundation of AI Spend Governance

AI infrastructure costs are generated at request granularity, yet most organizations implement controls at team and budget levels—a fundamental mismatch that observability dashboards cannot resolve. Vercel and Cloudflare's 2026 gateway documentation now expose request-level telemetry, reframing the challenge from 'can we see costs?' to 'can we deterministically assign each request to an owner, cost center, and control action?' Without request-level cost attribution embedded at the gateway boundary, FinOps teams operate in disguised blind spots despite rich dashboards.