Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most companies do not have an AI problem. They have a delivery problem wearing an AI costume. MIT’s Project NANDA research has been widely cited for a brutal headline statistic: roughly 95% of corporate generative AI pilots fail to produce measurable business impact or returns, while only about 5% break through to meaningful outcomes. (Yahoo Finance) The models are impressive. The demos are dazzling. The budgets are real.

AI is the new frontier for FinOps maturity. It introduces fresh spend patterns and new opportunities for value. As GPUs, inference, and retraining reshape costs, FinOps maturity grows through visibility, forecasting, and shared mindset about how these workloads drive business impact. In this 2025 post, I gave my guidelines for implementing AI tagging to give business context and clarity to vague AI invoices. Now, I’m sharing the next level up: how to drive FinOps in AI with AI.

When Anthony Leung talks about FinOps, he’s speaking from operating at real scale — not theory. As VP of Engineering Platforms and Security Research at Forcepoint, he led a transformation that cut cloud spend in half while improving availability, and built a culture where engineers own their economics.

Your AI coding assistant has read the entire internet. It knows every programming language, every framework, every best practice documented in Stack Overflow answers and GitHub repositories. It can generate a REST API handler in seconds that looks perfect with clean code, proper error handling, following all the patterns. But here’s what it’s never seen: your production traffic. Data from a real API request. Someone filling out a form with messed up or incomplete data.

Since 2016, when Microsoft announced its intention to make Linux a first class citizen in its ecosystem, Canonical and Microsoft have been working hand in hand to make that vision a reality. Ubuntu was among the first distributions to support the preview of SQL Server on Linux. Ubuntu was the first distribution offered in the launch of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and it remains the default to this day. Ubuntu was also the first Linux distribution to support Azure’s Confidential VMs.

Modern application security is struggling to keep up with AI-driven development and cloud-native scale, especially when security feels bolted onto CI/CD instead of built in. Harness SAST and SCA bring AI-powered application security testing natively into the Harness platform, reducing noise and alert fatigue. By identifying only vulnerabilities that are actually reachable in production code, teams get findings they can trust and act on faster.

The BCG recently released a report on the cost of cloud. The findings? Hyperscalers are charging up to 30% more for their sovereign-cloud offerings. It supports an earlier notion that if you want control, compliance, and jurisdictional certainty, you have to pay a premium. At Civo, we think that is broken. As data volumes grow and AI workloads become central to business strategy, the economics of cloud computing are being re-examined.