AI Inside the FinOps Practice: Practitioner Stories, Platform Releases, and the Agentic Shift
Two years ago, AI for FinOps was a slide in a deck and a pitch from a couple vendors. Today it’s the number one forward-looking priority in the 2026 State of FinOps. Ninety-eight percent of practices now manage some form of AI spend, up from 31 percent two years ago. And the same teams that learned to forecast cloud are now running budget cycles that get rewritten every time a new model drops.
The Day 2 keynote brings together practitioners running this transition at the largest regulated enterprises in the country, alongside the platform and cloud companies shipping the tooling that makes it possible.
What you’ll take away:
- A practitioner’s view from inside Fortune 100, Metlife’s SVP of Technology and AI, talking about “AI is cloud all over again, only 10x faster” actually means for value, forecasting, governance, and developer accountability
- The Crawl, Walk, Run model for agentic FinOps maturity, and an honest read on which stage most teams operate in today
- Google Cloud’s Strategic Shift: A look at how Google Cloud is closing the GenAI value gap by moving the industry from reactive post-billing alerts to proactive, autonomous control, drawing from their own internal journey of reimagining business workflows to scale AI sustainability from experimentation to production.
- The latest platform releases and industry direction from Oracle, IBM, and Flexera, including AI explainability agents, spend caps, anomaly detection, and the next wave of agentic cost controls
- How federated FinOps models, persona-based culture change, and shift-left pricing tools are scaling the practice without scaling the team
- Where FOCUS, the 2026 Framework update, and the Foundation’s global community work are heading next
