AI usage and access

The AI Usage & Access screen shows what AI has cost your organization, who has been using it, and who is allowed to.

Usage history

Usage is listed over time and can be grouped by hour, day, week, or month.

• Hour: for looking at a specific session. Useful when a big job has just run and you want to see what it drew down.
• Day: the everyday view. Enough detail to spot an unusual spike.
• Week and month: for trends and for setting a sensible top-up amount.

You can also filter by user, which answers the question that comes up on any shared balance: who is spending it. This is not about policing anyone. More often it shows that one person has found a genuinely useful workflow, and the rest of the team should hear about it.

Check usage in the first weeks of adopting AI. You quickly learn which kinds of request are cheap and which are not, and the pattern then holds.

Who may use AI

Each team member has a toggle controlling whether they may use AI in your organization. Turn it off and that person cannot spend from the wallet.

Some ways people use it:

• Start closed, open up. Enable a couple of people first, see what the spending looks like, then widen access once you know the pattern.
• Enable per role. Editors and writers get AI; people who only need to view reports do not.
• Turn it off temporarily. If the balance is low and a job matters more than experimentation, narrow access until you top up.

This toggle controls AI usage. It is separate from a person's role, which controls what they can change in your site. Both apply: someone with AI enabled and a viewer role can ask questions but cannot get AI to publish anything.

Topping up the wallet

The wallet is topped up in Billing. It is a balance held by your organization, separate from your subscription, and it pays for AI used inside BrightSite.

When the balance runs out, AI features stop working until it is topped up. Nothing else about your site is affected. Your pages stay live and everything else works as normal.

Auto-reload

Auto-reload tops the wallet up automatically when it falls below a level you choose. It is worth switching on for two reasons.

1. No interruptions. Running out in the middle of a long job is annoying, and it usually happens at the worst time.
2. Nobody has to remember. On a team, a manual top-up is somebody's forgotten task.

Set the trigger level high enough to cover a normal week of your usage, so a busy period does not drain it before the reload happens. Your usage history is the guide.

What this does not cover

The wallet pays for Lumi, the AI used inside BrightSite. It does not pay for an external AI tool connected over MCP. When Claude or Cursor works on your site, that tool is billed by whoever you pay for it, and your wallet is not touched. Connecting an external tool costs nothing here, and its usage will not appear on this screen.