The Retirement Ceremony: When to Kill AI Workflows Without Ghost Spend

A platform team shipped fourteen AI workflows to production in eighteen months—and formally retired two. The other twelve decayed: cron jobs still re-embedded stale corpora, API keys stayed active, and finance booked $41,000 per quarter to "legacy AI misc." Ghost spend is the tax on pilots that never graduate to kill decisions. A retirement ceremony—owner sign-off, telemetry drain, cap removal, eval archive—cuts orphaned inference within one billing cycle when executed as a checklist, not a ticket backlog item.

This case extends Pilot Graveyard to Production (entry gates) with exit discipline. The question is not whether a workflow failed; it is whether anything still bills after the team moved on.