Definition
Plain language
The discipline of managing cloud and AI compute costs in production deployments.
As stated in the literature
Financial operations practice focused on monitoring and controlling cloud and AI inference spend, especially for autonomous systems that can incur unexpected charges.
Why it matters: AI agents can rack up bills astonishingly fast through loops or expensive tool calls, and someone has to watch the meter.
For example, a FinOps team might set alerts that trigger when an autonomous coding agent's daily API spend crosses $500.
Heard on the show
“There's an enterprise FinOps report cited in the paper documenting exactly this — an AI agent trapped in a recursive reasoning loop, exhausting thousands of dollars of compute in a single afternoon.”Episode 030 — Why Your AI Agent Won't Stop Working — and Each Model Falls for a Different Trap