FinOps X 2025: IT cost management evolves for AI, cloud

Unification with ITAM

On day one of the event, the FinOps Foundation and the ITAM Forum announced their strategic partnership uniting cloud financial management with software compliance. This partnership reflects the growing convergence of these separate but related disciplines, both concerned with assessing and assigning business value for technology spending.

For organizations, combining FinOps use and cost data with ITAM software discovery and license management helps rationalize SaaS expenditures. The combination of FinOps forecasting, cost and usage tracking can arm IT leaders with insights to make software renewals more strategic and cost-effective.

The FinOps Foundation also announced FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification 1.2, or FOCUS 1.2, which now incorporates SaaS, PaaS and cloud billing in one schema. This provides a single dashboard or SQL query for a FinOps practitioner's scope of responsibility and reduces the potential for duplicate charges. It is a big step in the right direction toward the unification of the two disciplines.

FinOps for AI

It should come as no surprise that AI -- a technology whose expenditures are accelerating beyond even the explosive growth rates that characterized public cloud computing's rise -- was palpable throughout the conference, highlighting how the discipline born from cloud cost management is now evolving to address an even more financially impactful technological revolution.

Questions about what to measure, how to apply FinOps principles without stifling innovation and data sources dominated conversations. In a keynote session, Taiwo Ojetayo of Workday outlined how accounting for AI costs poses a particularly difficult problem for FinOps because the AI workload is volatile, is difficult to forecast, has fragmented token and compute costs that may need to be aggregated, and has rapid technology and model changes that can radically affect performance, token usage and, therefore, costs. But it is this difficulty that makes the problem of FinOps for AI worth solving.

To meet the challenge, the FinOps Foundation launched FinOps Certified: FinOps for AI, a new education series and certification built to help FinOps practitioners understand, manage and optimize AI spending within their organizations.

AI for FinOps

When it comes to applying AI to the practice of FinOps, vendors including Oracle and Google announced AI-enabled tools designed to help FinOps practitioners.

Oracle and Google have launched AI-enabled cloud cost anomaly detection tools, with Google claiming to have delivered over 1 million spend anomaly alerts to its customers to help them identify potential spending problems before they arrive on the monthly bill.

Oracle also announced hourly cloud emissions reporting to support GreenOps and carbon compliance initiatives. Google announced Gemini Cloud Assist to provide an AI-assisted report with utilization insights and a waste map.

Overall, FinOps X 2025 demonstrated that the discipline of FinOps has evolved and continues to evolve beyond its roots to become a broader framework for measuring and allocating an increasingly long list of variable, manageable and optimizable technology expenditures. The convergence with ITAM, the development of approaches to AI cost management and the integration of AI into the practice of FinOps signal a coming of age for FinOps.

The conference keynotes, content and sessions argued -- I believe correctly -- that organizations that embrace the Cloud+ concept and Scopes will be better positioned to manage the increasingly complex usage-based technology spending landscape, including AI.

Jon Brown is a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, where he researches IT operations and sustainability in IT. Brown has more than 20 years of experience in IT product management and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

Enterprise Strategy Group is part of Omdia. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.