FinOps Foundation on state of the FinOps nation: AI value & skills at the fore
The FinOps Foundation says it has extended and updated its mission to reflect the discipline’s progression and evolution from reactive cloud cost management to a more proactive focus on technology value.
The organisation has noted how far work is progressing in this space to coincide with its sixth annual State of FinOps report.
The foundation says its latest study shows that both managing AI and using AI is increasingly dominating the FinOps agenda.
There has also been a marked shift for the discipline itself to move from cloud-only work to broad technology value management with significantly elevated executive influence.
FinOps for AI
FinOps for AI (not known as FinOps or FinOpsAI yet, but perhaps one day) is now the top priority for enterprise technology departments… and this runs in line with the fact that AI value management is the primary skillset teams are seeking to add.
Many organisations say they are being asked to self-fund AI investments through efficiency gains, tying FinOps directly to strategic AI enablement.
“FinOps has definitively expanded to a broad array of technology value management and the FinOps Foundation has followed to reflect the full scope of what practitioners are doing in the industry today, what they influence, and how they use FinOps to drive greater value from technology investments,” said J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation. “As companies pursue transformation via AI, with the resulting increases in AI costs, FinOps practices will be critical to enable c-level decisions about multi-year strategic technology investments across infrastructure types”
The survey also confirms FinOps has moved well beyond the cloud. Nine of 10 practitioners are now being asked to manage SaaS (up from 65% last year), 64% manage licensing (up from 49%), 57% manage private cloud (up from 39%), and 48% manage datacentres. SaaS, licensing, and AI are now normalised parts of the FinOps remit, managed with the same discipline as cloud infrastructure.
Storment and team say that FinOps has shifted up into executive leadership and decision-making. 78% of teams now report to the CTO or CIO (up 18%) and those with VP/SVP/EVP/C-suite engagement show increased influence over technology selection: cloud service selection (53% vs. 24%), cloud provider selection (47% vs. 16%), and cloud vs. data center placement (28% vs. 12%).
Technology due diligence
The study also suggests that FinOps leaders “increasingly participate” in strategic provider negotiations, commitment structures and M&A technology due diligence, answering questions about ROI and value realisation, not just savings.
Some 28% of respondents reported managing or planning to manage labour costs in the FinOps practice, signalling continued expansion toward a broader technology value remit.
“Shift left is a top priority. Practitioners are embedding financial context earlier in the engineering lifecycle, allowing teams to make informed decisions pre-deployment rather than remediating after the bill arrives. Pre-deployment architecture guidance emerged as a top desired tooling capability,” reports the foundation, in a press statement.
Priorities have also shifted beyond foundational work. Despite continued focus on core optimisation as a basic concern, more respondents now prioritise governance, forecasting, organisational alignment and managing expanding technology areas than optimisation and efficiency alone.
Mature practices increasingly focus on unit economics, AI value quantification, and influencing technology selection, reflecting FinOps evolution from tactical function to strategic discipline.
FOCUS adoption accelerates
FOCUS is the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification.
FOCUS now continues to gain traction as practitioners seek consistent data across an increasingly complex technology landscape. All major clouds now generate FOCUS data natively: from AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and Oracle to Alibaba Cloud, Huawei and Tencent and even neocloud organisations (such as Nebius and Databricks), recently announced support.
Disciplines are also converging. FinOps teams are continuing the trend of integrating and collaborating more closely with IT Financial Management (ITFM), IT Asset Management (ITAM/SAM), and IT Service Management (ITSM), showing the widening expanse of FinOps influence across organisations.
Partnership with Platform Engineering teams are also increasingly mentioned. Larger companies tend toward collaboration between separate teams; smaller companies integrate them.
