The first sign of cost leakage is rarely a dramatic outage. It is more often a workflow that keeps moving while nobody is making fresh decisions about it.
That is why this problem usually shows up as governance drift before it shows up as technical failure. The software keeps doing exactly what it was allowed to do, long after the operating rules stopped being clear.
Quiet retries become real spend.
An agent can retry a broken step, call the same tool twice, or keep summarizing the same backlog. Each action looks small on its own. Together they become a budget line that survives only because nobody stopped to name it.
Governance should start earlier than the invoice.
The right checkpoint is not the end-of-month bill. It is the moment a workflow gets permission to keep going without a named owner, a stop rule, or an expiry on exceptions. Good governance is less about slowing the system down and more about making sure the system knows when to pause.
Better agentic workflows keep an evidence ladder.
Before a team scales an agent, it helps to keep three things visible: what the workflow did, what it cost, and who can stop it. That simple ladder tends to catch drift earlier than another dashboard full of summaries.
If the operating surface cannot answer those three questions quickly, the workflow is probably still too loose to scale safely.
If a workflow can keep spending after ownership gets fuzzy, the workflow is not governed yet.