Microsoft has set out new tools within its Foundry platform aimed at helping enterprises control AI agent spending and measure whether agents are delivering enough business value to justify their cost.
In a blog post published on 10 September, the fourth in a series on agent economics, Steve Sweetman, Microsoft's VP of Product Management for Foundry Models, said good governance needs to make agent consumption visible, attributable and bounded, since traditional cost tools track billing data after spending occurs rather than during a live request. Microsoft said its Foundry Control Plane can enforce token-based rate limits and quotas at the project level in real time, rejecting requests that exceed them, while a separate policy tool can apply consumption limits across multiple projects or model providers, including OpenAI-compatible APIs and Anthropic's Messages API.
The company also introduced ROI for Agents, a feature currently in private preview, which tracks the costs an agent incurs against defined business outcomes such as task completion or customer satisfaction, calculating net value and return on investment. Microsoft said this allows teams to identify low-return conversations and trace them back to specific inefficiencies, such as an oversized model or repetitive tool calls, rather than relying solely on token usage as a proxy for cost.
Microsoft said the new capabilities were separate from Microsoft Agent 365, which is aimed at IT and security teams managing an entire agent estate, while the Foundry tools were designed for developers building and optimising individual agents.
