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COMPEL Glossary / unit-economics

Unit economics

Cost and revenue per atomic unit — per transaction, per successful decision, per hour saved — for an AI feature.

What this means in practice

Unit economics reveal whether realized value exceeds per-unit cost before amortised platform investment; the first cut of any sunset-vs-sustain decision.

Synonyms

AI unit economics , per-unit AI P&L

See also

  • Total cost of ownership (TCO, AI) — Build + run + refresh + govern + retire cost across an AI feature's full life.
  • 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.
  • Per-task cost — An agent SLI capturing the full compute and API cost of a single task end-to-end — including all loop iterations, tool calls, memory reads and writes.

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