Dive Brief:
- AI adoption and complex cloud architectures are evolving the role of FinOps within the enterprise. While traditionally focused on cost-cutting and managing spend, FinOps teams are now helping businesses define the value of technology, according to Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud report. The enterprise software company surveyed 753 cloud decision-makers globally for the March 18 report.
- Generative AI accounts for more than half of public cloud services used by enterprises, with large companies investing heavily in governance and oversight. Meanwhile, 73% of organizations operate hybrid cloud architectures, up three percentage points year over year. The rapid rise of AI adoption is contributing to IT and cloud management complexity overall, the report found.
- As a result, nearly half of FinOps teams are aligning spending with business outcomes compared with 40% in last year’s report. “Cloud success is no longer about trimming budgets — it’s about proving ROI and enabling innovation,” according to the report.
Dive Insight:
As companies struggle to find returns on AI, FinOps teams are stepping up to provide guidance on what investments will move the needle toward positive business outcomes.
At Capital One, Jerzy Grzywinski, senior director of cloud governance and FinOps, is part of a team that focuses on maximizing the value of cloud, putting his team “at the center of the conversation” for strategic AI investments with the C-suite.
He’s not alone. Nearly 4 in 5 FinOps teams report to the CIO or CTO, up from 61% in 2023, according to a recent survey from the FinOps Foundation. AI adoption has propelled FinOps teams to a more centralized role offering perspectives on managing AI spend and gaining efficiencies.
Grzywinski said understanding a company’s culture and focus, measuring spend and adding insights on efficiency and business value help drive where the company should continue investing.
“Do we want to host GPUs to train our own models? Do we want to leverage a SaaS offering for developer productivity or some capability?” Grzywinski told CIO Dive. “And we really model out what we think the cost of those will be. How does that weigh against other spend that we have in our portfolio and ultimately what are we comfortable investing in.”
From there, Grzywinski and his team shift toward execution, staying close to “benchmarking what that spend is,” he said. “The fun part for my team is, what levers can we pull to leverage this technology in a more efficient way?” he added.
As Capital One adopts AI and other technologies, Grzywinski said FinOps looks for patterns of inefficiency and then works with users or platforms to establish controls that increase efficiency while maintaining the tool’s capabilities.
The goal of FinOps is to create better visibility into spend and what’s driving it, along with providing insight on that data, Grzywinski said. Tracking spend is still important, but the team also implements KPIs to measure efficiency across different technologies, which gets reported to the CIO, he added.
“We wanted to create a top-down and bottom-up pressure point to drive positive and efficient outcomes, really working back toward, ‘How do I get engineers to think about efficiency as part of how they build, what they build, how they maintain their products,’” Grzywinski said.
Overall, FinOps has matured beyond cloud migration and managing spend to “how do we thrive in the cloud,” including for AI and other technology investments, Grzywinski said.
“Thriving in the cloud means building better decisions, building better architectures to operate in the cloud,” he said.
