FinOps In Full Bloom

James Pelton is a serial entrepreneur, YouTube creator with 83,000+ subscribers, and Senior DevRel at Zencoder — an AI engineering platform. He founded and exited a mobile SMS marketing company, then pivoted into AI tooling, content creation, and multi-agent system building. He currently runs roughly 10 income streams, several of which are managed by AI agents he built himself.

This episode is a practical, honest look at what it actually takes to build and trust AI agents — from the finance bot that deleted his entire inbox to a framework for evaluating businesses across three currencies: time, energy, and money.

James Pelton founded and exited Mobile Text Alerts, an SMS marketing platform, before pivoting into AI tooling and developer relations. He is currently Senior DevRel at Zencoder, an AI engineering platform that orchestrates multiple models for software development teams. He also runs a YouTube channel with 83,000+ subscribers focused on hands-on AI workflows for everyday people. A software developer of 20+ years, James brings a builder's mindset to making AI accessible far beyond the technical community.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/ 

Joan "Coach J" Nelson is the founder and CEO of Beyond Digital Branding Solutions, a former global HR leader who turned a 2024 layoff into a six-figure AI consulting business in under two years. Her framework — Pivot to Profit — helps entrepreneurs and professionals monetize their existing skills using AI-powered systems, automation, and tiered offer strategy.

This episode covers how Joan built and scaled her business using AI tools, referral-first growth (85% of her 2025 revenue came from referrals), and a relentless commitment to investing in herself — including cashing out her 401k to get in the right rooms.

Joan Nelson is the founder and CEO of Beyond Digital Branding Solutions and a lead trainer for Growth Hub 365, a global AI-driven education community of 10,000+ business owners. A former global HR leader with 20+ years advising C-suite across five regions, she pivoted after a 2024 layoff to build a six-figure AI consulting practice. She now helps entrepreneurs future-proof their businesses through her signature Pivot to Profit framework.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/ 

Ebony Sykes is the founder of InsurSuccess, a firm helping independent Medicare insurance agents build financial data sovereignty and operational efficiency in an AI-enabled market. Her core argument is simple and countercultural: before you automate anything, get your processes right - because AI scaled on top of broken workflows just produces more broken outcomes, faster.This episode covers how Ebony measures success by lifestyle improvement rather than output metrics, why she pivoted her own product delivery mid-growth when it was already working, and what the insurance industry's AI reckoning actually looks like on the ground.

Ebony Sykes is the founder of InsurSuccess, a firm dedicated to operational excellence and financial performance for independent Medicare insurance agents. With deep roots in change management and process design, she builds browser-based, human-in-the-loop automation tools that reduce administrative burden without replacing the human relationships at the center of insurance work. She also hosts the podcast Mind Over Machine.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/

This episode covers how Emily Allen used CloudZero data to analyze AI tool usage across her organization, identify model-level inefficiencies — specifically the over-reliance on Claude Opus for tasks better suited to Sonnet — and generate approximately $30K in annualized savings through targeted conversations with internal teams. She also addresses the broader challenge finance leaders face with AI spend: the shift from centralized procurement to distributed, card-swipe adoption, and what that means for visibility and accountability.

Emily Allen is the Director of Finance and Accounting at CloudZero, where she sits in the rare position of actively using the product she helps support financially. A CPA with Big Four roots, she has held finance roles at CarGurus and Roku before landing at CloudZero, where her 
proximity to the product gives her a practitioner's view of how FinOps tooling can serve finance teams beyond the engineering org. Her perspective in this episode is grounded in hands-on execution — not theory.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/ 

This episode covers how Corin is approaching the new layer of complexity that AI introduces: governing access without blocking engineering velocity, building a centralized LLM API gateway (LiteLLM) to provide secure, auditable, and cost-attributed AI access at scale, and keeping an eye on the cloud spend that teams are quietly leaving behind while chasing the next model release. He also shares how carbon footprint data has become an unexpected but effective lever in convincing engineering teams to make smarter infrastructure decisions.

Corin Bishop manages public cloud operations at Cloudera, a $1B+ enterprise data company, where he is responsible for both keeping multi-cloud infrastructure running and ensuring that every dollar spent on AWS, GCP, and Azure is owned, allocated, and accounted for. He introduced FinOps as a formal practice at Cloudera from scratch and has driven it largely as a one-person function, using a combination of tooling, cross-functional partnership, and governance discipline. His current work spans AI access governance, LLM cost attribution, and cloud carbon footprint reporting.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/ 

Brian Mullins is the Head of Engineering at Diaceutics, a platform company improving patient identification in precision medicine. He brings a technically grounded, detective-minded approach to FinOps — one built on granular telemetry, unit cost modeling, and the discipline of not optimizing prematurely.

This episode covers how Brien's team doubled platform query volume while holding costs flat by applying the same cost visibility and attribution practices to AI workloads that they already had in place for traditional cloud infrastructure. He walks through real examples: eliminating $6,000/month in redundant processing, catching a warehouse left on the wrong tier, and using unit cost experiments at 10, 100, and 1,000 records to project AI spend before it scales. He also makes the case that cost anomalies are not just a FinOps signal — they are a security signal too.

→ Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/

In this solo-hosted recap episode, Thalia Elie reflects on the key insights, transformations, and moments of inspiration from the first season of FinOps in Full Bloom. From CloudZero customers and internal leaders to global FinOps advocates, Thalia shares what she’s learned, what moved her, and what’s coming next in the journey to cost clarity and cultural change.

This episode features solo commentary by Thalia Elie, FinOps Account Manager at CloudZero and host of FinOps in Full Bloom. Known for her empathy, clarity, and community mindset, Thalia reflects on what she’s learned from interviewing FinOps practitioners across industries—and how their stories illuminate the path to lasting impact.

 Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/

What does it take to drive FinOps maturity across a multi-cloud, acquisition-heavy enterprise? In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom, host Thalia Elie sits down with Greg Colletti, Senior Principal Service Partner at Progress, to talk about building FinOps maturity brick by brick—from account naming and tagging to cross-team buy-in and automation. Greg shares how Progress implemented the FOCUS framework, scaled FinOps from 8 to 80 stakeholders, and selected CloudZero as their tool of choice.

Greg Colletti is a Senior Principal Service Partner at Progress, leading a team of project managers and product owners across enterprise operations. With roots in business and finance, Greg brings a uniquely holistic lens to cloud transformation—combining technical rigor with organizational empathy. He’s spearheaded initiatives to implement the FOCUS framework, scale cloud governance, and activate product teams across a rapidly growing, acquisition-driven company.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/

In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom, DebraAnn Braun, Chief Solutions and Advisory Officer at UbiMinds, shares how AI is transforming FinOps - when done right. She outlines how to measure innovation velocity, build trust between humans and AI, and create self-healing budgets with agentic AI. If you’ve been overwhelmed by where to start or how to scale, this episode offers a clear, value-driven roadmap.

DebraAnn Braun is a 25-year tech veteran and current Chief Solutions and Advisory Officer at UbiMinds. A recognized leader in AI readiness and agentic systems, she helps enterprise teams align technology velocity with FinOps discipline - while maintaining ethical governance. DebraAnn is a powerful advocate for human-AI collaboration and operational efficiency at scale.

 Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/ 

Bindu Sharma, Senior Director of Cloud FinOps at Teradata and FinOps Foundation sustainability leader, joins FinOps in Full Bloom to share her transformation story - from manual reporting to enterprise-scale optimization. In this episode, Bindu explores how to embed cost-aware culture, why carbon metrics matter, and how AI is reshaping both FinOps and her personal growth.

Bindu Sharma leads global FinOps strategy at Teradata across AWS, Azure, and GCP. As the Cloud Sustainability capability chair within the FinOps Foundation, she champions operational efficiency, automation, and climate accountability. Known for her collaborative style and strategic vision, Bindu brings over a decade of leadership in cloud financial management and enablement.

 Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/