KEY INSIGHT: Day 2 of FinOps X 2026 a reminder that while AI won’t replace FinOps, practitioners who master AI will succeed throughout the intelligence era. The Foundation presented a Crawl, Walk, Run model for agentic maturity and announced FOCUS 1.4. Practitioners from Pinterest and MetLife shared their AI and agentic FinOps stories, while Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloudability, Flexera took the stage with new feature releases, from AI explainability agents to the next wave of agentic cost management.
Welcome back for the second keynote of the conference, a deep dive into AI for FinOps. If you missed the Day 1 keynote, check out this Insights post.
Ishita Vyas, APAC Community Lead at the FinOps Foundation presented a Crawl, Walk, Run model for agentic FinOps maturity, built on real-world best practices from the global community. She offered a way to think about how teams move from automated alerts toward agentic cost management by providing business context.
Mike Fuller, CTO of the FinOps Foundation, gave the crowd a reminder: AI won’t take FinOps jobs, but FinOps practitioners who know AI better will. He described what AI demands of practitioners, from the data and the tooling to the technical foundations that make the work possible as the practice matures. He closed with another empowering point: as AI scales decisions, FinOps scales in importance.
Sarah McMullin, Head of Product at Google Cloud, showed the community their AI-ready FinOps playbook, a strategic shift to close the AI value gap by moving the industry from reactive post-billing alerts to proactive, autonomous control. She walked through how to put it into action with the FinOps AI Explainability Agent, full-stack AI cost visibility in Cost Reports, Automated Spend Caps, and support for FOCUS 1.2.
Ambud Sharma, Principal Engineer at Pinterest, framed two flavors of Tokenomics: Product AI, the launched AI features built for public consumption, and Internal AI, tooling and infrastructure usage. He showed Pinterest’s “Tokenomic Layer Cake,” a way of stacking AI optimizations so that value compounds continuously when done right.
Bill Lobig, Vice President and GM at IBM Cloudability, showed the community their focus on building financial intelligence for modern technology decisions. He walked through Conversational Insights, the Cloudability MCP Server, and the FOCUS AI Agent, features built to help practitioners achieve that financial intelligence.
Sonali Niswander, MetLife’s SVP of Technology and AI, joined J.R. Storment in a fireside chat to discuss what “AI is cloud all over again, only 10x faster” actually means for value, forecasting, governance, and developer accountability.
Shawn Alpay, Director of Data Engineering at the FinOps Foundation, took the stage to announce FOCUS 1.4, along with other Foundation news for the community. He covered what’s new in the latest version of the specification and what it means for practitioners working to standardize their cost and usage data.
Learn more about FOCUS 1.4 and check out the FOCUS MCP Server.
Nick Armstrong, Director of Product Management at Oracle, took the stage to talk about Oracle’s FOCUS 1.3 support and new features that help FinOps reduce friction in cloud cost management, with shorter paths, faster signals, and less translating of disparate data.
Becky Trevino, Chief Product Officer at Flexera, gave the community a look at Flexera’s AI Spend Management platform, which spans apps, agents, models, and compute. Practitioners can start testing the platform today with prompt-based visualizations.
Erik Carlin, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of ProperOps (a Flexera company), introduced their Unified Autonomous Rate and Workload Optimization. Erik also revealed ProperOps+, a platform that enables autonomous outcomes to help practitioners with ROI.
Token Economics waits for no one, and the conversation doesn’t end with FinOps X. J.R. gave more detail about Tokenomicon, an evolution of FinOps X dedicated to the economics of AI. Join us for our first, smaller Tokenomicon events in Amsterdam, September 22-23, 2026, followed by London, February 8-9, 2027.
The FinOps X 2026 Day 1 Keynote opened the conference with Token Economics and the new job of FinOps, featuring practitioners from SAP, Prudential, and Shutterstock alongside Accenture, AWS, and Microsoft.
