FinOpsX 2025: Scaling FinOps to $2 Trillion—But Still Chasing Engineering Action

San Diego didn’t bring a lot of sun, but it did deliver some seismic shifts in FinOps. This year’s FinOpsX Summit made one thing clear: we’re no longer just managing “cloud costs.” We’re governing $2 trillion in technology spend. But while the vision matures, the toughest challenge remains unchanged: getting engineers to act.

Our CTO Simon Mestdagh came back energized and inspired—with sleeves rolled up to embed these new ideas and practitioner feedback into TRU+. Here’s his view of what mattered most:

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1. Cloud+ Scopes Are the New Standard: $2 Trillion Under Governance

The opening keynote by J.R. set the tone with the Cloud+ vision—a single FinOps governance layer for SaaS, PaaS, GPUs, on-premises, licensing, and more. This expansion into “Scopes” isn’t theoretical—it now applies to $2 trillion in annual tech spend.

“We’re entering a phase where FinOps isn’t just about optimizing infrastructure. It’s about being the system of record for all technology value delivery,” Simon reflected.

He noted how each domain—whether SaaS or AI—needs domain-specific KPIs and ownership. This structure is already reshaping how we tag, track, and attribute usage in our stack and think about our product roadmap.

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2. Engineering Action: Still the Missing Link

Despite the evolution, one message came up repeatedly: it’s still hard to get engineers to take action on cost insights.

Many practitioners confirmed; Engineers are overwhelmed or don’t perceive cost tasks as a priority. And recommendations from the centralized FinOps team often remain unactioned, even when savings are substantial.

Many orgs acknowledged that FinOps lacks the “muscle” to enforce changes unless backed by leadership, distributed to the engineering teams and tied to performance incentives.

This is where TRU+ comes in and wants to change the game by turning FinOps into a game engineers want to play, and win!

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3. Tying AI Cost to Business Value

One of Simon’s favorite sessions was Swapna Samuel’s breakdown of BMO’s three-tier AI cost framework:

1. Technical – GPU hours
2. Operational – Feature usage
3. Business – Revenue per feature

“We’ve already started enriching our anomaly context with this model,” Simon said. “It’s the only way to defend AI spend going forward.”

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4. FOCUS 1.2: Now Powering Real-World SaaS & PaaS Governance

Cory Syvenky demoed FOCUS 1.2 extensions—invoice-level IDs, SaaS/PaaS support, and better hierarchy mapping. We’ve already integrated FOCUS into TRU+ and will be contributing our extensions back to the open-source community.

This isn’t academic: it’s helping us unify and normalize billing across AI APIs, SaaS tools, and platform services—pivotal in hybrid environments.

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5. New FinOps for AI Certification: Building Internal Muscle

Simon’s been proudly mentoring others through the Professional FinOps Certification, and now he’s teeing up our team for the AI-specific certification launched at the summit.

“As AI spend accelerates, we need specialists who can tell the story of cost and value, not just run reports.”

Certifications are great—but the real win is cross-training engineers and FinOps leads to speak the same language.

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6. Practitioners Feeding the Community

The community’s contributions were some of the most inspiring:

• Lóránt Kiss and Priyanka Pandey (Delivery Hero) onboarded 50+ SaaS vendors to FOCUS 1.2
• Thomas Hammer (Nubank) cut cost variance by 35% by linking product features to cloud usage

This energy is contagious. Also we at TRU+ want to bring the spirit of open collaboration into our FinOps process docs—more transparency, more feedback loops, more community.

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Final Thoughts: From Spend Awareness to Spend Activation

FinOpsX 2025 made one truth unavoidable: spend visibility isn’t enough. It’s activation—closing the loop between insights and engineering response—that separates great FinOps from vanity reporting.

We took this opportunity to launch our new AI for FinOps solution and present it to the community. The best feedback received from many of the practitioners was that we stand out with a new, refreshing approach to driving engineering engagement, ownership and control bottom up.

At TRU+, we’re proud to be building with this mindset and contributing to a growing FinOps adoption and maturity. Thanks to the community for leading the way towards true cloud efficiency!