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AI Budgeting for Finance: Last Year vs. Now In this video, Emily Allen, Director, Finance & Accounting at CloudZero, explains how AI planning changed in a single year. Instead of starting from a vendor commit or the current run rate, she’s treating AI spend as its own category and analyzing it bottom-up. That opens a new question for finance: “What does good look like?” With a year of data, finance teams can start benchmarking AI spend over time and check whether what they approved actually paid off.

In this video, Brady Lenahan, VP of Sales at CloudZero, shares what he’s hearing from customers when the cap hits before the month ends: employees who’ve built their workflows around AI stop working productively and wait for next month. Some go golfing, some clean the garage. Either way, finance loses both the productivity and the visibility. There’s a better option than capping AI spend you can’t see.

In this video, Emily Allen, Director, Finance & Accounting at CloudZero, explains why AI capitalization is still unclear for most finance teams, and how CloudZero gives them a repeatable approach. As AI writes more of the code, finance needs to know which AI spend went to qualifying development work and which should be expensed. CloudZero records which project each AI coding session served, what kind of work it was, and what it cost, so finance has the evidence behind every decision.

Cloud and AI spend in one place, tied to the teams, products, and customers behind it. Your bill tells you what you spent. CloudZero tells you why, and whether it paid off. This quick tour shows how CloudZero pulls cost from AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Snowflake, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more, then allocates it to what your business actually cares about. No perfect tagging required.

See who’s spending on AI, on which models, for what work, and what you got for it. Most companies can tell you what they spent on AI last month. Very few can tell you what it bought. In this demo, we show how AI Signals captures AI usage as it happens and ties every dollar to the person, team, and work behind it, across every model and provider.

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.

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