The COMPEL Glossary Graph visualizes relationships between framework terminology, showing how concepts interconnect across domains, stages, and pillars. Term nodes cluster by pillar affiliation while cross-references reveal semantic dependencies — for example, how risk appetite connects to control effectiveness, model governance, and assurance requirements. This network representation helps practitioners navigate the framework vocabulary and understand that COMPEL terminology forms a coherent conceptual system rather than isolated definitions.
COMPEL Glossary / total-cost-of-ownership-tco-ai
Total cost of ownership (TCO, AI)
Build + run + refresh + govern + retire cost across an AI feature's full life.
What this means in practice
AI-specific TCO adds token economics, retraining cost, guardrail-maintenance cost, and incident-response cost that classical IT TCO models underweight or miss. Required input to both business case and sunset decisions.
Synonyms
AI TCO , lifecycle cost of AI
See also
- Unit economics — Cost and revenue per atomic unit — per transaction, per successful decision, per hour saved — for an AI feature.
- FinOps for AI — The FinOps Foundation's Inform-Optimize-Operate lifecycle applied to AI workloads — visibility into AI spend, optimisation of token and compute costs, and operational discipline.
- Compute budget (VDT) — A pre-agreed ceiling on training or inference compute per AI feature per period — expressed in tokens, FLOPs, or dollars.