We're in the early days of cost impacts for AI applications. While there are some cautionary tales, current spending seems to be a small fraction what's to come. Analysts Jean Atelsek and Melanie Posey return to the podcast to talk about what they heard at the FinOps X conference with host Eric Hanselman. The need for cost management in AI is seen as so great that the FinOps Foundation, a project of the Linux Foundation, is talking about morphing its conference into Tokenomicon and pivot into token economics. The portmanteau of tokenomics is sweeping across cloud and AI services providers, as well as IT vendors, as enterprises wrestle with dueling forces of AI acceleration and management constraints for access and cost.

Unlike FinOps for cloud operations, the costs and metrics for AI are fairly opaque. Some enterprises are trying to manage costs by limiting access, but that risks stifling the innovation and democratization that is supposed to come with AI transformation. Request routing is promising, but it requires understanding the nature of the request and the suitability of available infrastructure to fulfill it, something that is not well understood by many. Most are just getting comfortable with managing model lifecycles and the step up to cost management can be a large one.

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For S&P Global subscribers:

• FinOps in the age of agentic AI
• FinOps Foundation expands FinOps discipline beyond cloud to technology value management
• Service providers race to meet surging enterprise demand for AI infrastructure
• FinOps Market Monitor & Forecast

Host/Author: Eric Hanselman

Guests: Jean Atelsek, Melanie Posey

Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible

Published With Assistance From: Feranmi Adeoshun, Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith,