presented by Kion & CloudZero

FinOps Weekly
Summit 2026

October 20 & 21, 2026

Stop Chasing Cloud Costs.
Start Driving Business Value.

The FinOps Weekly Summit 2026 is the one online event this year designed to give you the actionable playbooks you need to transform your FinOps practice. Move from reactive fire-fighting to strategic leadership by learning directly from the world’s top experts on unit economics, automation, and governance.

Don’t get left behind. This is where the future of FinOps is decided.

Speakers

Agenda

Day 1

FinOps Weekly Summit Keynote

Summit Introduction

Victor García | FinOps Weekly

15:00

Surviving the age of AI outcomes | When every decision is a buying decision

AI spend is on track to eclipse the rest of the cloud bill. Citizen developers and agent workflows are outpacing traditional engineering teams, so cost is no longer created only inside the old engineering perimeter. Every decision is now a buying decision — who gets which model, which agent runs which workflow, which experiment ships — and the economic consequence shows up in hours, not on next month’s invoice.

Activity metrics alone cannot keep up with that. Tokens and model calls measure the meter. They do not tell you whether the work inside the prompt was researching the market, writing a sales pitch, shipping code, or generating pictures of cats. Without classifying that work, it is impossible to truly understand the ROI of AI spend, because you cannot tell productive output from noise.

This session argues for moving past cost attribution to outcome attribution: classify the work, allocate the dollars to the teams and workflows that created them, and connect that spend to the business outcomes it produced — while the signal is still fresh enough to act on.

Erik Peterson | CloudZero

15:15

FinOps for AI architecture components

You should know what all are the infrastructure components contending as the top cost contributors to form a view on the AI cost.

Stuti Kaushal | Pepsico

16:00

From Visibility to ROI: How Datadog's FinOps Team Manages AI Costs at Scale

Join Datadog’s FinOps team for a fireside chat on what it takes to manage AI costs at scale, including building a trusted data foundation, understanding the ROI of your AI spend, and uncovering ways to optimize your spend.

Brendan McFarland | Datadog

16:25

Advanced AI Optimization with AWS (co speaker Adam Ritcher)

This session walks through a practical framework for taking control of AI infrastructure costs across three stages: visibility, optimization, and sustainability. Drawing on real-world engineering experience, we cover how to instrument observability for AI workloads, which KPIs matter for model performance and efficiency, and how to use intelligent routing and token optimization to reduce waste without sacrificing capability. Attendees leave with a working monitoring approach, concrete cost optimization techniques, and automation strategies they can apply immediately.

Loïc Fournier and Adam Ritcher | AWS

17:00

FinOps adopting with a community

Building a FinOps culture means creating a shared culture where teams rethink how they work, make data‑driven decisions together, and embrace accountability. We use a community is the central driver for the adoption.

Mathijs Hendriks | Rabobank

17:25

Change in Practitioners Playbook

The evolving playbook of finops practices.

Vailbhav Sharma | Teleperformance

17:40

Deal Velocity: Using FinOps Practices to Unlock M&A Value Faster

Getting cloud economics right during an acquisition isn’t an afterthought — it’s a competitive advantage. This session walks through a practical FinOps framework for M&A, covering cloud cost discovery in due diligence, establishing unit economics baselines, rationalizing vendor contracts, and building a unified FinOps culture across merged organizations to drive faster business value.

Peter Crenshaw | IEM

18:00

Cost-effective AWS Security: Tips & tricks from real projects

Main aim of this presentation is to share my experience from numerous projects on how to optimize your spendings while maintaining a high level of AWS cloud workload protection. We will cover the following aspects of optimizing costs for AWS security:
1. Cost-optimized approach to deploying and maintaining multiple AWS WAF instances.
2. AWS GuardDuty cost-optiization options.
3. How to reduce costs for compliance checks in AWS (CIS, NIST, PCI and more).
4. General tips & tricks that can save you costs while using AWS security services.”

Ihor Sasovets | Techmagic

18:30

Laws of AI Economics

We will unpack the Laws of AI Economics to help technology and finance leaders bridge the gap between tokens and P&L You will learn how to replace “model monoculture” with intelligent routing to reduce costs. Manage the quadratic cost curves of agentic loops , and shift your core metrics from raw token counts to the cost per business outcome.

Sandeep Shilawat | IBM

19:00

Day 2

FinOps Weekly Summit Keynote

Summit Introduction

Victor García | FinOps Weekly

15:00

Visibility Gets You Started. Guardrails Maximize The Value.

We’ll look at what this in practice: how the visibility layer enables you to set proactive controls, and ultimately how those guardrails help improve outcomes on every token generated.

Whether you’re still building your visibility foundation or you’re ready to take the next steps towards guardrails, you’ll leave with a clearer picture of the role they play in taking critical actions to maximize value.

Tatum Tummins | Kion

15:15

CostGoblin: Open-Source CUR Analysis That Runs on Your Laptop

Cost Explorer is too high-level, Athena and QuickSight need infrastructure setup for every new question, and SaaS tools lock your billing data behind a vendor.

CostGoblin is an open-source desktop alternative: load a CUR locally, get to answers in minutes, no cloud setup required. This talk covers why I built it, the design choices that make the local-first approach work, the analysis patterns FinOps practitioners can apply immediately, and a live walkthrough on a real (anonymised) CUR.

Etienne Chabert | HelloFresh

16:00

The AI ROI Reckoning: From Token Spend to Business Value

We are going to discuss a question most teams haven’t gotten to yet: what is AI investment actually returning? Our State of AI in FinOps report found that only 26% of organizations have a robust way to measure AI’s business value, and just 21% call their AI cost management fully mature, even though two in three orgs are already spending over $250,000 a month on AI. Visibility and token optimization solve the “how much are we spending” problem. This session tackles the harder one: how do you tie that spend to a real business outcome, build unit economics that hold up to a CFO, and govern it before the next surprise bill hits (72% of orgs had one this past year). We’ll bring the panel back to talk through what this looks like in practice.

Drawing from real-world experience delivering 8-figure savings at scale for Starbucks, this talk breaks down how leading organizations are shifting left, embedding cost, governance, and accountability directly into engineering workflows. No dashboards. No after-the-fact cleanup. Just systems designed to deliver value from day one.

Patrick Brogan | Harness

16:30

Controlling the real cost of AI in production

Explore how FinOps principles can be applied to AI architectures to optimize cost, performance, and business value. This session covers the fundamentals of tokenomics and AI architecture, including inference, token usage, prompts, model selection, and KV caching. We’ll also look at practical optimization strategies around usage, rates, licensing, benchmarking, RAG, context engineering, fine-tuning, and agentic workflows. Through real-world use cases, we’ll compare different models and architectures to understand their impact on cost, quality, and ROI.

Bastien Martins Da Torre | CloudFinOps

17:00

When AI Manages AI Costs: The Agentic FinOps Frontier

The evolving playbook of finops practices.

Prasshant Sharrma | Sysco

17:30

FinOps++ Maturity Assessment Deep Dive

Join us for a deep dive into the art and science of FinOps Assessments. We will show proven strategies for evaluating your team’s capabilities to uncover the true operational strengths and growth opportunities of your practice. We will also discuss how to use assessment data to inform the roadmap for maturing your FinOps practice and to communicate progress to leadership.

Victoria Levy (SailPoint), Andrew “Q” Quigley (Northwestern Mutual) & Tanjiha Mahmud (Canada Life)

18:00

FinOps for GreenOps in the Age of AI: When Every Token Has a Carbon Cost

I introduce a unified framework for optimizing cloud cost and carbon for AI workloads. Attendees will learn:

– Carbon-aware scheduling: Time-shifting training and batch inference to low-carbon grid windows while capturing spot savings of 60-90%
– Carbon unit economics: Extending cost-per-inference to carbon-per-inference; giving teams carbon budgets alongside financial budgets
– Model efficiency as a dual lever: How distillation and quantization cut both cost and emissions by 3-10x
– The agentic AI wildcard: Governing carbon when autonomous agents spawn unpredictable compute chains

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for unifying their FinOps and sustainability strategies as AI workloads become the dominant driver of cloud spend and emissions.

Deepika Prabhakara | AWS

18:30

Your Cloud Bill Was Decided Before You Deployed

We’ll challenge one of the biggest misconceptions in FinOps, that optimization happens after deployment. The reality is sharper: your architecture, configurations, and deployment patterns lock in cost before a single workload goes live.

Benjamin Linares | Anglepoint