Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In our increasingly online world, managing cloud, AI, and other tech spend has shifted from a good idea to an absolute necessity. But even when cost management is a priority, how do you get busy development teams and engineers actively engaged in the new practices? New initiatives are often viewed as more work on the team’s plate, which is an understandable deterrent to adoption. That leaves FinOps proponents struggling to get others on board.

FinOps insights for IT leaders often focus on cloud spend, but IT leaders know that real cost drivers extend across hybrid environments. Achieving clarity requires more than budget reports. It requires understanding how workloads behave over time, how performance and capacity shift, and where visibility gaps hide operational and financial risk. To support those efforts, we sat down with Tim Conley, creator of Galileo, to explore practical FinOps insights for IT leaders.

One year ago, at AWS re:Invent, we launched CloudZero Advisor, a free, standalone AI assistant that enables anyone to ask questions about cloud spend in plain language. It was the first experiment of its kind in FinOps, a chance to see what people really wanted to know when cost data finally became conversational. Over the past year, Advisor has become a learning engine.

(Almost) everyone is using generative AI, and just as many aren’t seeing any benefits. Research firm Gartner calls it the “gen AI paradox” — nearly 80% of companies say they’ve invested in generative solutions, and the same number report no benefits to their bottom line. What’s more, 90% of projects are stuck in pilot mode; ready to take off, but just can’t get up to speed.

FinOps thrives on clarity, and clarity is built on metrics. Metrics give engineering and finance a shared language to understand costs, evaluate trade-offs, and guide innovation. The most impactful metrics go beyond “how much are we spending?” and help us answer: When we measure these things, we stretch beyond tracking progress to fueling it.

FinOps continues to grow in importance as organizations balance cloud services with on-prem systems, legacy applications, and evolving business demands. Many teams want to manage their costs more effectively but are unsure how to apply a FinOps strategy for hybrid IT outside the cloud.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned at CloudZero, it’s that success in FinOps isn’t just about having the right tools. It’s about knowing how to use them, and understanding the “why” behind every number, dimension, and dashboard.

Harness has modernized Commitment Orchestrator to give FinOps teams a clearer, faster, and more intelligent way to manage cloud commitments. The redesigned experience unifies visibility across RIs, Savings Plans, on-demand, and Spot usage, with expanded metrics and streamlined workflows for smarter decisions. Built on a foundation for AI-powered insights, it helps teams optimize spend with greater confidence and less manual effort.