Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Enterprises operating at cloud scale today face a growing reality: managing infrastructure performance and cost in silos no longer works. Kubernetes, multi cloud environments, and GPU accelerated workloads deliver immense agility and capability, but they also introduce complexity that outpaces traditional monitoring and cost governance approaches.

For most of the last decade, the direction of cloud strategy was clear: standardize, consolidate, and reduce sprawl. Engineering teams worked to pick a primary cloud, reduce vendor dependencies, and simplify their stacks. FinOps teams unwound years of fragmentation. Platform teams built guardrails to make sure it didn’t happen again. Then AI arrived, and it’s a fundamentally different class of workload. AI demands specialized hardware and, increasingly, diverging providers.

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When I joined Kubex last year, the company was already well aware of the growing power of Large Language Models. As a company focused on intelligent resource optimization for Kubernetes, GPUs, and cloud infrastructure, generative AI didn’t feel like a threat so much as a natural extension of where the industry was heading. Kubex had already invested heavily in machine learning, but it was becoming clear that foundation models could unlock an entirely new class of capabilities for our customers.

AI assistants are quickly becoming a primary interface for how people interact with software. Developers ask them how to integrate APIs. Users ask them how products work. Buyers ask them how tools compare. Increasingly, the first explanation someone receives about your product does not come from your website, your documentation, or your sales team. It comes from an AI assistant. That shift has an important consequence that many organizations are only starting to notice.

Deployments are one of the few moments where software development still feels risky. Teams may have tests, a staging environment, and careful review processes, yet the final step still carries uncertainty. Will this change behave the same way in production? Will it interact cleanly with existing data, traffic, and infrastructure? Will it introduce regressions no one anticipated? Preview environments exist to reduce that uncertainty.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most companies do not have an AI problem. They have a delivery problem wearing an AI costume. MIT’s Project NANDA research has been widely cited for a brutal headline statistic: roughly 95% of corporate generative AI pilots fail to produce measurable business impact or returns, while only about 5% break through to meaningful outcomes. (Yahoo Finance) The models are impressive. The demos are dazzling. The budgets are real.

AI is the new frontier for FinOps maturity. It introduces fresh spend patterns and new opportunities for value. As GPUs, inference, and retraining reshape costs, FinOps maturity grows through visibility, forecasting, and shared mindset about how these workloads drive business impact. In this 2025 post, I gave my guidelines for implementing AI tagging to give business context and clarity to vague AI invoices. Now, I’m sharing the next level up: how to drive FinOps in AI with AI.

When Anthony Leung talks about FinOps, he’s speaking from operating at real scale — not theory. As VP of Engineering Platforms and Security Research at Forcepoint, he led a transformation that cut cloud spend in half while improving availability, and built a culture where engineers own their economics.