Same location, same energy, same passion. All the anticipated qualities of FinOps X 2025 returned even with it being the biggest FinOps X ever. In every keynote and every presentation, it was apparent. But, it wasn’t just that this was the most attended FinOps X. No, it was clear to everyone that FinOps has become larger than just public cloud. From beginning to end, we saw the topics of Scopes, AI, and FOCUS dominated the conference.
Getting Deeper into Scopes
Debuted at FinOps X Barcelona in November 2024, Scopes started drawing the attention of practitioners who have been asked to cover more than just public cloud. Scopes started as topics such as public cloud, private cloud, and SaaS, and we quickly saw Scopes evolve as AI got added in.
This year, we witnessed the continued momentum and evolution. Anthony Johnson of MGM Resorts shared how Scopes has become company specific, including how an organization can develop a Scope that is unique to them. Each business might view a scope differently, and they can be made up of different personas. He shared how at MGM Resorts, personas that focus on a public cloud Scope are different from personas focused on a private cloud Scope.
To further showcase the evolution of Scopes, on the eve of FinOps X, the FinOps Foundation announced a strategic partnership with the ITAM Forum. The partnership enforces the idea that organizations are embracing Cloud+ environments more and more inclusive of SaaS, private cloud, and licensing and not just public cloud.
J.R. Stroment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, said “This partnership reflects the growing demand for a combined strategy that connects FinOps’ real-time cost insights with ITAM’s proven compliance and lifecycle management.”
What’s the Deal with AI?
FinOps for AI is just FinOps! – Mike Fuller
As part of FinOps X in San Diego in June of 2024, AI was one of the most brought up topics with both practitioners and vendors alike speculating about how AI would ultimately impact their FinOps practices and the world.
In 2025, people weren’t just asking about AI, they were now talking. AI was one of the most discussed topics for keynotes, breakouts, and chalk talks. AI sessions included managing increasing AI costs, using AI to help organizations do FinOps, and discussing organizational best practices around AI. The CloudHealth team delivered a breakout session specifically focused on the development of an AI tool to assist businesses in practicing FinOps called Intelligent Assist (more on that below). Needless to say, as the use of AI grows and matures, it is not only dominating day to day lives, but it’s also continuing to become a focus for FinOps teams.
To match the momentum that AI has, the FinOps Foundation announced an AI specific certification and course. This certification is targeted at the FinOps practitioner who is looking to apply FinOps principles to AI spend.
A Focus on FOCUS (1.2)
As part of FinOps X, we saw three new providers announce support for FOCUS. Alibaba, Databricks, and Grafana have joined the ranks of AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle in their support of the FOCUS standard.
As a part of the release of 1.2, we see FOCUS continuing to push cloud providers to a more standardized reporting methodology. In this release, there is a much more intentional alignment with Cloud+. The FOCUS 1.2 release has introduced the concept of virtual currency to account for tools where cost is not the unit used to track consumption. Some examples of these virtual currencies include “credits”, “tokens”, or “DBUs (Databricks Units)”.
FOCUS 1.2 also introduced a handful of new columns. Pricing Currency fields were introduced to handle multicurrency use cases. Specifically, these are used in cases where a practitioner needs to see normalized cloud spend across multiple currencies, but also needs to know the exact total that they were billed by each provider.
The seven new columns that were introduced are:
- InvoiceId
- BillingAccountType
- SubAccountType
- PricingCurrency
- PricingCurrencyEffectiveCost
- PricingCurrencyListUnitPrice
- PricingCurrencyContractedUnitPrice
Organizations Continuing to Shift Left
The idea of Shift Left was still front and center as two major organizations shared their FinOps stories during the keynotes presentations.
Align discussed their efforts around cost aware engineering. They are focused on making engineering decisions like application residency, and educating their teams on the impact those use cases have on data transfer costs.
Wayfair shared how they were able to shift FinOps left and encourage engineers to consistently re-evaluate whether they are using the most efficient model. They did this by showing their engineering teams how savings can be reallocated to fund other projects due to limited budget and by showing product teams that the website was updated quicker.
CloudHealth at FinOps X
FinOps X was huge for the FinOps community as a whole, but just as significant for CloudHealth. As the first premier member of the FinOps Foundation dating back to 2020, the team was ecstatic at the opportunity to become a platinum sponsor at FinOps X 2025.
Being a first time platinum sponsor of FinOps X was the perfect opportunity for Cloudhealth to showcase what the team has been working on for the previous 18 months. Energy and passion drove the general availability of the new CloudHealth experience. On the Expo floor, CloudHealth demonstrated the AI-powered features that are a part of the new experience, Intelligent Assist and Smart Summary.
Intelligent Assist is a genAI FinOps co-pilot embedded in the platform that helps users take full advantage of CloudHealth capabilities with product guidance, reporting generation capabilities, actionable recommendations, and more. Intelligent Assist is a large language model-enabled chatbot that allows users to gain insights about their clouds and services through natural language, such as granular custom reports or best practices relevant to their cloud usage. It makes tasks simpler for experienced users while helping to break down barriers to entry for business-oriented personas who are interested in exploring their cloud cost and usage. By enabling technical and non-technical users alike, Intelligent Assist is a crucial feature in enhancing collaboration across the FinOps team and organization, making data accessible to all decision-makers and ensuring everyone has access to and is using the same data in their day-to-day operations.
Smart Summary has been designed to help teams stay on top of the impossible task of understanding the daily changes that are driving cloud cost changes. Smart Summary provides users with a concise summary of what is driving your cloud spend, how and why it changes over time, and relevant Generative AI-assisted suggestions to take action. Smart Summary is a first of its kind tool that highlights CloudHealth’s ability to track changes at a per-resource level with reasoning as to why changes have occurred and recommendations for next steps.
Taking the Next Step
Whether you’ve been doing FinOps for a long time or this year’s FinOps X signifies your organizational starting point, CloudHealth is here to assist you throughout each stage of the FinOps Framework. Click Here to have CloudHealth come alongside your organization as part of your FinOps Team.
