Adedeji Awolesi

As I travelled to FinOps X 2026, I found myself reflecting on how much my FinOps journey has evolved over the years. From attending as a practitioner eager to learn, to speaking at industry events, leading FinOps initiatives for clients, building communities and helping organisations across different regions adopt FinOps practices, the journey has been both rewarding and humbling.

In this blog post, I will share my personal experience, key lessons, takeaways and reflections on where FinOps is heading next.

Journey to San Diego

One of the things I appreciate most about FinOps X is the location and venue of the event. San Diego is a major Californian city along Pacific coast with its good climate (25°C), top attraction and history.

Every year, the conference has grown and 2026 looks like the biggest leap with over 2500 practitioners, 263 speakers, break sessions, chalk talks and more networking event, FinOps X 2026 is the biggest conference I have attended this year.

The theme this year was clear – AI Value: The Era of FinOps for AI, Token Economics and Agentic FinOps.

Walking into the venue for registration, I could feel that this is not going to be a quiet year as I believe the discipline has evolved.

Key Highlights

• Token Panic – Day 1 keynote from J.R Storment (Co Founder of FinOps Foundation) showed that token consumption has gone exponential and CFOs are now demanding answers for it. A lot of teams have built their AI ROI models assuming token prices would keep dropping the way compute prices did but they didn’t. I found out that structural supply limit, GPU constraints and energy costs means that token cost is not dropping anytime soon. This has lead to several practitioners admitting to now rebuilding their forecasting model from scratch.
• Tokenomics Foundation – A new initiative was announced on stage, a collaboration between the FinOps Foundation and the Linux Foundation. This is aimed at creating open, unified standards for AI billing across providers. If FOCUS solved the cross cloud billing mess (See previous post), Tokenomics is shaping up to be the answer for the AI billing mess we are all currently living through.

• Agentic FinOps – This was everywhere. From the keynotes to the expo hall to conversations between practitioners as discussion has clearly moved from “how do we visualise spend” to “how do we act on it”. AWS announced its new FinOps product which is the FinOps agent and vendors also showcased numerous autonomous agents that detect anomalies, investigate root causes and route remediation without anyone clicking through any UI interface. I am still waiting for Microsoft announcement on this.

• FOCUS keeps maturing – FOCUS adoption was a major theme for me this year. I was genuinely impressive watching this specification mature year over year into something practitioners actually use rather than just talk about.
• Pre CON – This year I registered for the Pre Conference which is a chalk talk session of several topics where practitioners brainstorm on different topics and themes. I had the opportunity to represent my team at the chalk talk discussion of Expanding FinOps Practice, Adopting FinOps and Shift left. It was engaging and I learned from other practitioners on how these practices are being adopted within their organisation.

• Africa Community – It great to see that the Africa Community within the FinOps space has grown. One of my goals 3 years ago was to evangelize FinOps within Africa and I can now see more practitioners from Africa background and start seeing the reward of my effort.

See my Video and conversation with Victor of the FinOps Weekly

Networking per excellence

If I am being honest, this is the part that keeps pulling me back every year. The sessions will teach you the frameworks but the hallway conversation, expo hall chats, evening event is actually where you feel the pulse of the community. Between sessions, I find myself in conversations with practitioners from different industries all solving the same problems. Some were deep into AI cost, Infrastructure, Cost Visibility while others are just starting and just asking different questions.

I got to reconnect with people I have met at previous event, those I follow their work online, vendors that I have tested and used their tools and also give suggestions on how they can improve their product.

My Key takeaway

• Value over savings – The narrative has now shifted from “how much did we cut” to “what value did this spend create”. This is a meaningful mindset change for practitioners and organisations.
• FinOps for AI is its own discipline now – FinOps for AI is now seen as not an extension of cloud FinOps but as a discipline that behave differently enough because it now needs its own forecasting models, governance and structure.
• Automation is no longer optional – Agentic FinOps is moving from buzzword to what cloud providers and vendors are now actually deploying. Detection, investigation and remediation are now being handled by agents with humans stepping in only where judgement is needed.
• Reality vs Standards – Just as FOCUS solved multi cloud billing chaos, Tokenomics is being built to solve cross provider AI billing chaos before getting out of control.
• Community Relationships – The value of showing up and being present with community becomes clearer. As earlier mentioned, frameworks evolves but it is relationship, conversation and people that provide more value and carry you from one conference to the other.

Final Thoughts

This years conference is the biggest edition i have ever attended. The discipline is clearly at an inflection point, the same way cloud adoption forced a reckoning a decade ago, AI adoption is forcing one now.

I left San Diego with a much clearer sense where the discipline is heading. FinOps is no longer just about cloud bills, it is becoming the backbone of how organisations think about technology value altogether.

Its so sad that the conference will no longer be called FinOps X, We are moving into a new world of Tokenomics.

I also had a good time touring Los Angeles.

See you in Tekonomicon 2027!!!