How to Fund AI without Letting Cloud Spend Spiral
What starts as a few AI pilot projects can quickly expand into rising and uncontrolled costs.
AI initiatives are moving from isolated experimentation into real operational use. Rising cloud consumption, duplicated tooling, unmanaged SaaS spend, growing data infrastructure demands, and unclear ownership across business units all contribute to a new wave of cost complexity (and frustration).
Join us on May 28th at 1pm ET for this 45-minute discussion on how organizations are approaching AI cost management in a world where FinOps is evolving beyond optimization toward governance, forecasting, accountability, and technology value.
What You'll Get from This Session:
- A clearer view of where AI costs are showing up: Hear how organizations are starting to see AI-related spend surface (often before it’s formally tracked or understood).
- How teams are thinking about funding AI initiatives: Explore how orgs are approaching AI investment conversations, including how they’re making room for experimentation without losing financial control.
- Insight into when governance becomes important: We'll discuss the signals that AI usage is moving to something that needs real ownership and basic guardrails.
- How organizations are interpreting “value” in early AI efforts: Hear how teams are defining success and the challenges of measuring impact when use cases are evolving.
- A cross-industry perspective on how FinOps is changing: Understand how practitioners are adapting cost visibility, forecasting, and accountability practices as AI becomes a core part of the technology landscape.
This session is designed for IT and business leaders navigating the realities of AI adoption in complex environments. Join industry experts as they discuss practical ways organizations are transforming AI cost management from a reactive challenge into a strategic discipline.
Our Expert Panel:
We're bringing together experts from Bluewave, Expedient, CBTS, and Bucher + Suter to provide a broad cross-industry perspective on the evolving challenges surrounding AI cost management and operational accountability. Rather than hearing a single viewpoint, you'll gain insight from multiple areas of the technology ecosystem in one conversation.
Kris Hogaboom
Solution Advisor, Bluewave
With deep experience designing and deploying IT infrastructure for organizations ranging from small businesses to global enterprises, Kris is known for translating complex technical challenges into scalable solutions that support performance, cost, and long-term business goals.
AJ Kuftic
Field CTO, Expedient
AJ has over 20 years of experience helping organizations users build solutions that are sustainable and easy to manage. Having knowledge across various silos of IT infrastructure and technology gives AJ a unique perspective of the pain points and what customers are looking to improve.
Jon Lloyd
Field CTO, CBTS
Jon has over 16 years of experience in IT strategy, architecture, and implementation. His ability to communicate complex concepts to stakeholders has earned him a reputation as an effective leader. His expertise in IT strategy has helped organizations develop and maintain their technology infrastructure.
Kenny Barton
Head of Sales, Bucher Suter
With an extensive track record in technology sales leadership, his current role as Head of Sales, Americas at Bucher + Suter encapsulates over two decades of dedication to enhancing partner networks and pioneering strategic sales initiatives.
This Discussion is Ideal For
organizations actively exploring or scaling AI initiatives and needing greater clarity around cost management and operational accountability.
This discussion is particularly valuable for organizations that:
- Are experiencing rapidly growing cloud or SaaS costs tied to AI experimentation and usage.
- Are struggling to identify where AI-related spending is actually occurring across teams, platforms, and vendors.
- Want to enable AI innovation without creating uncontrolled or fragmented technology investments.
- Need clearer governance, ownership, or approval processes before AI adoption scales further.
- Are being asked by executive leadership or the board to justify AI investments with measurable business outcomes.
- Are reevaluating their FinOps strategy as AI introduces new forecasting and operational challenges.
- Want guidance on balancing AI adoption, financial accountability, and long-term business value without slowing innovation.
Who Should Attend?
- CIOs and IT Directors responsible for balancing AI innovation with budget accountability and long-term strategy.
- FinOps and Cloud Financial Management Leaders looking to improve visibility into AI-related cloud consumption and forecasting challenges.
- Infrastructure and Cloud Operations Teams managing the growing impact of AI workloads on cloud environments, storage, compute utilization, and infrastructure planning.
- IT Finance and Technology Procurement Leaders responsible for evaluating AI investments, and controlling spend.
- Security and Governance Stakeholders helping establish policies, ownership structures, and operational guardrails as AI adoption expands across the organization.