BYOK (bring your own key)

AWS KMS, for example, lets you import your own key material, a feature AWS says is often known as BYOK. The flip side is responsibility: IBM notes that without a valid master key, data can become permanently inaccessible.

In AI software, BYOK means you enter your own API key from a model provider such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, and the tool calls the model on your account. You pay the provider directly, choose the model and keep usage under your own provider terms and limits. GitHub Copilot, for example, lets users bring their own model provider keys.

For example, a team personalizes 20,000 emails a month at about 1,500 tokens each, roughly 30 million tokens. With BYOK, those tokens bill to the company's own model provider account under its existing data terms, and finance sees AI spend on one invoice instead of spread across several sales tools.

For sales and RevOps teams, AI BYOK matters at volume. Personalizing tens of thousands of emails or classifying every reply runs millions of tokens a month, and BYOK puts that cost on an existing provider contract where you can see it. Encryption BYOK comes up in security reviews of vendors that store customer data, often next to a request for a SOC 2 report.