---
title: "By the job: 10 things people are trying to stop happening"
canonical_url: "https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases"
published: 2026-09-02
last_updated: 2026-10-21
---

# By the job: 10 things people are trying to stop happening

Organised by the task rather than by the capability, because that is the shape most people arrive in. Every one of these ends on what the job still does not solve once you have done all of it, which is the part a reader would otherwise discover in production.

- Find out what AI costs this business, line by line (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/what-ai-actually-costs): A vendor, a tool, a team and an owner on every line. Billed kept apart from metered.
- Know which AI tools people are paying for, and whether anyone approved them (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/know-who-approved-the-ai-tools): Three states with unknown as the default, an owner on every entry, coverage on its own axis.
- Stop agents leaking personal data and secrets to model providers (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/stop-agents-leaking-pii): Detect sensitive data in requests and responses. Mask or tokenise supported text, with the detector limits set out below.
- Cap what an AI agent can spend before it spends it (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/cap-ai-agent-spend): Refused before egress, priced against everything the route could reach, never estimated at zero.
- Produce audit evidence for AI agents that an auditor accepts (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/audit-evidence-for-ai-agents): One bundle with a verification verdict inside it, and the protection level beside the verdict.
- Control which tools an AI agent may call (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/govern-mcp-tool-access): Grants re-checked at execution rather than at the list, and a changed descriptor is quarantined.
- Find the AI use happening outside your controls (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/find-shadow-ai): Bring five evidence sources together. See which feeds are connected, stale or missing.
- Put a person in front of a consequential agent action (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/require-human-approval): One decision, bound to one exact payload, spendable once. Nothing calls the agent back.
- Stop one agent, a whole team, or everything, now (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/kill-a-misbehaving-agent): Checked before every other control. Stops new governed work; it cannot recall actions already dispatched.
- Answer whether an agent was allowed to do that, after the fact (https://tokenobserve.com/use-cases/prove-an-agent-was-authorised): The authority as it stood at the moment of the call, and a review bound to a digest.