AI is driving EU cloud & FinOps adoption - FinOpsX reflections

This September’s FinOps X Day in Amsterdam underscored one key message: FinOps is real, and Europe is catching up fast. Our team travelled up north and shared these reflections after a great day full of interesting conversations, learnings and connections:

‍

AI is driving EU cloud adoption

Most European enterprises are still in the learning phase, with cloud pilots covering about 20% of their IT spend. The expectation is clear: these pilots will set the stage for much larger-scale cloud adoption in the coming years.

Driving this shift is the recognition that every company now needs an AI strategy, which in turn accelerates cloud adoption. Interestingly, in Europe, there is also growing demand for cultural and people-focused support — multiple service providers are helping organizations adopt a true FinOps mindset, not just tooling.

‍

The Big Debate: FinOps Scopes

The central topic in Amsterdam was FinOps Scopes, which elevate FinOps from a purely operational function to a management-level discipline. Scopes directly influence critical build vs. buy decisions, especially as maintaining in-house solutions becomes increasingly unsustainable.

Benjamin Van Der Maas from Johnson & Johnson captured this well:

“In the past, building custom solutions made sense because most tools only addressed about 50% of the organization’s needs… But as dashboards now span multiple scopes, continuing to build internally would turn the FinOps team into an application development team. That creates unsustainable maintenance demands. The future will likely push decisions toward buying rather than building.”

‍

Anomaly Detection: Build Today, Buy Tomorrow?

Also when it comes to anomaly detection, many companies still rely on custom-built tooling, tailored to their workloads or real-time needs. But scaling these systems in a standardized and manageable way is proving complex. As a result, the market is shifting — organizations are increasingly willing to buy, if a tool can help them prioritize and resolve anomalies efficiently across their entire cloud footprint. This is exactly where TRU+ comes into the picture!

‍

‍

Standout Presentations

Several sessions stood out for their insights and practical frameworks:

• Marc Diensberg from Amadeus went deep on cost allocation and awareness, introducing the concept of North Star Metrics (NSM). Their central question: “Am I spending money efficiently relative to the value I’m delivering?” By tying these metrics to unit economics, they drove real accountability across teams. The impact was clear — after introducing NSM, Amadeus achieved significant cost savings.

• Savina Stoykova from Snyk shared how aligning cloud operations with customer behavior can unlock major value. By predicting workload seasonality, organizations can guide licensing and rate optimization strategies in a way that directly supports business objectives.

• And Clara Gonzalez from Lego presented their FinOps for Engineering Platform, which showcased the value of automated anomaly detection. Their approach resembles our vision at TRU+, but it took Lego 4 years to build their solution in-house, underlining the trade-off between building and buying.

‍

What’s next?

Bottom line: FinOps in Europe is moving from experimentation to strategy. With the rise of Scopes, AI-driven adoption, and frameworks like NSM, FinOps is no longer a back-office function—it’s becoming a boardroom conversation.