Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When CloudZero’s CTO Erik Peterson joined the FinOps Weekly podcast in October 2025, he didn’t hold back. Instead of going on about the usual best practices of AI cost optimization, he posed challenges to how we approach AI spending. From “zombie AI experiments” eating your budget to why you should stop apologizing for using AI, these 10 insights from the podcast are worth considering in how we approach AI FinOps. (Watch the full podcast below and keep reading for more!)

The IT landscape in enterprises today is complex, hybrid and dynamic and the complexity is also increasing rapidly due to increased containerization, microservice-based apps, and the overall scale of digital operations.

Gartner recognizes Last9 in their latest Cool Vendor report for unified telemetry and agentic SDK—moving teams from reactive monitoring to proactive ops. Founder at Last9. Loves building dev tools and listening to The Beatles.

Rolling out a powerful AI tool like GitHub Copilot is a big win for any engineering leader. But because it’s such a significant investment, leadership will inevitably ask if it was worth the cost. Until now, answering this was nearly impossible. While GitHub provides adoption stats, connecting that data to real-world performance metrics like cycle time or code quality has been a manual, frustrating process. We built the Cortex AI Impact Dashboard to provide a clear answer.

Building a catalog used to be a project. It meant months of tracking down owners, untangling dependencies, and manually piecing together a picture of your architecture. It was a tedious, thankless process that delayed the value of your Internal Developer Portal (IDP) before you even got started. Now, it’s a coffee break. We’re excited to introduce Magellan, our new AI-powered data engine designed to build your catalog and get your IDP live in minutes.

Here's a scenario every on-call engineer knows too well: a critical incident fires for a service you’ve never seen before. Your first ten minutes are a frantic scramble across wikis and Slack channels just to answer the most basic questions: Who owns this? What does it do? Where are the runbooks? By the time you’re oriented, the incident has escalated.

At Cribl, we’ve talked a lot about epochs. A moment in time when there was a before and after. AI, and specifically agentic AI, is an epoch. The way we work is going to forever change. There have been many such events in our lifetimes: the PC, the Internet, and the smartphone. AI will change how we work forever. Prior to the PC, there were people whose jobs were literally titled “computer”.