June 4, 2025 | Article: 5 minute read, 90-minute watch
KEY INSIGHT: FinOps X 2025 Day 2 Keynote covers both sides of the AI coin: AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI. Applying familiar FinOps practices to AI spend enables organizations to achieve their AI goals. However, there are new elements to learn when managing AI spend and when looking to optimize at specific financial moments. Major cloud providers announce new AI for FinOps features in their products to support FinOps practices.
FinOps X 2025 recording sponsor IBM Cloudability.
J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, welcomes attendees back for the second keynote of the conference – a deep dive into FinOps for AI. If you missed Day 1 Keynote, check out this Insights post.
Mike Fuller, CTO of the FinOps Foundation, explained that all of the learning, training, and experience they’ve gained over the years still applies as practitioners tackle FinOps for AI. The FinOps Framework’s components are still a north star and guiding path when navigating AI-driven cost and usage.
At the end of the day, FinOps for AI is just FinOps!
Mike also covered the importance of building an AI Scope that best serves your organization’s strategy. AI advancements change the way we think about consumption data– AI-related decisions cut across Data Center, SaaS, and cloud. FinOps Practitioners need to get involved in decision making across these Scopes to succeed.
Later he talked about the areas of an AI application that you can own or use AI services for and the implications and benefits of both. He identified the optimization levers available at all the different points across the AI infrastructure available to you to prioritize.
Taiwo Ojetayo of Workday told us how AI’s emerging presence at Workday means adjusting business strategies to maximize value from AI investments, both for customers and internal stakeholders.
Kim Floss of PepsiCo joined us to unveil how they manage the data that serves their AI needs on a global scale. Analytics and AI require a massive amount of data, but also create huge volumes of data to ingest, analyze, and report upon.
Global companies like PepsiCo are evolving the way they identify and act upon optimization opportunities.
Showcasing what an advanced practice looks like, Brent Eubanks, FinOps Architect at Wayfair took to the stage. Brent detailed an AI driven shopping experience at Wayfair and described the AI cost and usage implications of optimizations that the FinOps team was able to make. He also talked about how they plan to advance their Machine Learning and AI-driven features to further experiment with improving the Wayfair experience.
AI advances quickly, alongside FinOps challenges that come with it. To help practitioners navigate these changes, the Foundation has launched FinOps Certified: FinOps for AI, a new education series and certification built to help you understand, manage, and optimize AI spend.
Cloud Product leaders from Google Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle took to the stage to unveil announcements that will benefit and empower FinOps practitioners on their platforms.
See our dedicated Cloud Announcement article for all of this information.
Between cloud announcements, Nishant Gupta, EVP of Engineering at Salesforce, took to the stage to discuss what advanced optimization looks like at Salesforce and what trends he sees on the horizon. He covered how he translates across the different oragnization levels, feeding executive objectives down and FinOps insights up to maintain alignment to the business strategy.
It’s time to add our next FinOps X gathering to your calendar! We hope to see all of our amazing community back in San Diego for FinOps X 2026, June 8-11.
Catch up with the Day 1 Keynote in case you missed it, or the FOCUS 1.2 announcement.
