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

Pilots that never die cleanly leave ghost spend—orphaned embeddings, cron jobs, and API keys. A five-step retirement ceremony kills run-rate within one billing cycle.

Executive Summary

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 retire…