⭐ Day 1 Keynote: The Wild West of AI, Token Economics and the New Job of FinOps ⭐

Token Economics, Model Lifecycles, and the New Discipline of FinOps for AI

Two years ago, the mandate was simple. Go all-in on AI. Cost would be figured out later.

Speed beats efficiency. Token consumption went exponential. CFOs stopped asking and started demanding. And FinOps teams everywhere realized something unsettling: FinOps for AI is not Cloud FinOps. The cost profiles are different, the optimization levers are different, and the stakeholders sitting at the table are different.

The Day 1 keynote brings together leaders running this work at global scale, alongside the hyperscalers, SIs, and platform companies reshaping the underlying economics. Practitioners from SAP and Shutterstock will share what they’ve actually built, including the metrics, the governance, and the hard-won lessons. Microsoft, AWS, and Accenture will weigh in on where the platforms and the practice are heading next.

What you’ll take away:

• A working framework for FinOps for AI built on three pillars: spend visibility, token economics, and AI value
• How leading enterprises are managing model retirement cycles measured in months, not years, and the commercial trap of model providers shifting delivery channels mid-contract
• The “Token Factory” framing Jensen Huang put on the map, and how it translates into a FinOps practice that maximizes the value of every token
• Why Jevons paradox is hitting AI spend harder than it ever hit cloud, and what that means for forecasting
• A practical model for reporting AI cost data to finance, engineering, product, and the board, without building five different dashboards