3 FinOps trends to look out for in 2026

A holistic approach to managing hybrid and multi-cloud costs

Organizations increasingly operate in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. These deployment models introduce greater complexity, especially in managing cloud costs. Cloud visibility -- the ability for IT teams to comprehensively monitor and analyze an organization's entire cloud infrastructure -- is a must-have capability.

"FinOps teams are getting better at bringing traditional IT, cloud and asset management disciplines together. As environments grow more complex, organizations need shared visibility and common allocation practices that hold up across the entire stack,” said Litkey.

Organizations will need to rethink their cost management in these types of environments. Crawford calls for a holistic approach to managing value across the cloud providers, not just within each individual provider.

"FinOps provides organizations with a key business ability that has traditionally been missing in cloud environments: comparing multiple cloud and neo-cloud providers to each other in a comprehensive fashion and seeing how various workloads affect pricing in a holistic manner," said Hyoun Park, vice president of telecom and mobility management at Calero.

It provides a more granular, nuanced way to compare cloud vendors and optimize based on the strengths each provider has across various areas, such as storage, compute, networking and compliance.

"This means that FinOps, which has to this date been very technical in practice, will start having a deeper financial component as FinOps starts being pulled more deeply into budgeting practices, cash flow and treasury planning, and other business planning processes," said Park.

However, FinOps is moving away from being just a cost-reducing measure and increasingly towards how technology investments are planned, governed and valued, according to the State of FinOps 2026 Report.

"FinOps will be a core cloud operating discipline, not just a cost-optimization exercise, as AI workloads introduce volatile, usage-based spend," said Varun Raj, a cloud and AI engineering executive.

AI for FinOps

AI remains a widely adopted technology and can serve as a powerful asset when organizations use it with FinOps. It can also heavily influence cloud buying decisions by providing real-time cost insights and predictive analytics, paired with automated execution to make cost-effective choices.

It can empower line-of-business managers to interrogate cloud environments, invoices, alerts and requests, as well as ask deeper questions about the cloud and other IT costs that keep growing in their profit-and-loss responsibilities, according to Park.

"AI for FinOps is still developing. Today, it primarily helps teams interpret data and surface insights. The real transformation will come when AI can pair those insights with automated execution for rate and workload decisions to happen in real time," said Litkey.

According to the FinOps Foundation, 49% of respondents said using AI for their FinOps practices is of high importance, with another 32% reporting medium importance.

Common uses for driving such responses include:

• Anomaly detection and faster alerting.
• Automated right-sizing recommendations.
• Natural language querying of cost data.
• Automated discount instrument procurement.
• Tagging resources to speed up allocation.

As seen in these uses, automation remains a key part of a FinOps strategy, especially when AI is introduced.

"Automation is already reshaping cost management by helping teams act faster and more consistently. There are clear opportunities to automate tasks that do not affect workload performance, which frees up time for teams to focus on high-priority initiatives that require human judgment and decision-making," said Litkey. "Organizations need automation to make a dent on cloud inefficiencies, which continues to grow with increasing cloud spend."

The rise of the developer-facing FinOps

When IT people talk about FinOps, developers are not the first people who come to mind. However, they are becoming a more important voice when it comes to spending.

"[An] important trend is the shift toward developer-facing FinOps. More teams are integrating cost accountability into engineering workflows so they can address waste early in the development process," said Litkey.

52% of engineering leaders say the disconnect between FinOps and developers is leading to wasted spend on cloud infrastructure costs, according to the FinOps in Focus 2025 report by Harness. Additionally, 62% of developers said they want more control over and responsibility for managing cloud costs.

With developer-facing FinOps, developers are made aware of the financial implications of their decisions, such as provisioning cloud resources, scaling applications or choosing specific services. Even more important is access to tools and dashboards to gain more visibility and monitor the costs associated with their workloads in real time.

However, too many tools can do more harm than good as complexity rises -- especially in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Litkey is seeing continued momentum in platform consolidation as teams look for fewer tools that can handle visibility and optimization across rates and workloads.

Kathleen Casey is the site editor for SearchCloudComputing. She plans and oversees the site, and covers various cloud subjects including infrastructure management, development and security