Key takeaways:
- 300+ FinOpsX conversations revealed leaders are overwhelmed by AI, hybrid, and Kubernetes costs.
- Top challenge: AI spend is a black box, with no clear cost-to-serve metrics.
- Hybrid adoption is accelerating, but tools still assume cloud-only.
- Kubernetes attribution remains a blind spot.
- FinOps needs more than dashboards — leaders want visibility, accountability, and control.
At Mavvrik, we turn these pain points into solutions with unified visibility, AI/GPU cost governance, and hybrid-ready financial control.
FinOpsX 2025: A Conference or a Confessional?
Between booth chats, hallway deep dives, and our now-infamous personality badges (yes, you are a Spend Whisperer), we had more than 300 conversations with FinOps, engineering, and finance leaders.
The message was clear: people are overwhelmed.
The financial model for infrastructure is shifting faster than the tools, teams, and processes can keep up. AI is exposing cracks that already existed — and creating new ones.
Here’s what we heard loud and clear:
FinOps for AI ≠ AI for FinOps
The phrase “AI for FinOps” was everywhere. And sure, better anomaly detection and smarter tagging rules help.
But most teams were more concerned about FinOps for AI:
- “How do we govern the cost of AI infrastructure that’s totally unpredictable?”
- “What’s the unit economics of running this model?”
- “How do I align pricing with cost-to-serve?”
Why it matters: AI doesn’t just need clever prompts — it needs financial governance. That means tracking GPU usage, understanding model-level spend, and mapping costs to business outcomes.
How Mavvrik helps: We provide model- and GPU-level cost visibility, automate allocation, and prevent surprises with real-time alerts.
AI Spend Is Still a Black Box
Almost no one could confidently answer:
- How much are we spending on LLMs?
- What does this agent cost to run?
- How much GPU did that customer burn last month?
Leaders hate reporting “% of total cloud spend” because it says nothing about value. The conversation is shifting toward cost-to-serve at the feature, model, or outcome level.
How Mavvrik helps: Our cost-to-serve dashboards give teams unit economics at the feature, customer, or product level — turning black-box spend into measurable business value.
Kubernetes Is Still a Visibility Nightmare
Yes, Kubernetes helps scale. No, most people can’t see what it’s costing them.
Common frustrations we heard:
- Shared clusters with no attribution
- Internal platforms where “nobody owns the bill”
- Cost spikes they couldn’t trace
There’s still a huge gap in cost telemetry for Kubernetes workloads — especially with AI in the mix.
How Mavvrik helps: With multi-dimensional tagging and intelligent attribution, Mavvrik tracks Kubernetes costs by team, project, or workload so spend doesn’t disappear into the cluster.
Hybrid Is Back, and More Complicated Than Ever
On-prem isn’t just legacy anymore — it’s strategic. GPU scarcity and data gravity are pulling workloads into private cloud, colocation, and even HPC environments.
But cost visibility isn’t following. Most tools still assume a cloud-native world.
As one attendee put it:
“We have workloads in 4 clouds and 2 data centers. We need one picture. Not 6 dashboards.”
How Mavvrik helps: Our unified dashboards span cloud, hybrid, and on-prem, giving enterprises a single source of financial truth across every environment.
People Want a Hero. And a Hug.
The biggest surprise? The badges.
What started as a fun icebreaker, “Pick your FinOps persona!,” sparked more conversations than any pitch. People leaned in. Laughed. Shared war stories. Asked for photos. And most importantly, they opened up.
It wasn’t just about tools. It was about identity, visibility, and control. The pressure of being the one person standing between AI ambition and budget reality is real.
Everyone is looking for a hero. Sometimes, they just need to know they’re not alone.
Final Takeaway
FinOps is no longer just about cloud. It’s about control.
- Control over AI.
- Control over hybrid infrastructure.
- Control over financial truth.
- And most of all — control over the narrative.
We’re grateful to have had 300+ of those conversations. Let’s keep them going.
Ready to take control? See how Mavvrik helps enterprises govern AI, hybrid, and Kubernetes costs.
FAQs
Q1: What were the top FinOps challenges discussed at FinOpsX 2025?
Attendees highlighted AI cost governance, hybrid visibility, and Kubernetes attribution as the biggest ongoing blind spots.
Q2: Why is AI spend so hard to govern?
AI introduces unpredictable units, GPU hours, tokens, inference jobs, that traditional FinOps tools can’t easily allocate or track.
Q3: How can enterprises improve visibility into Kubernetes costs?
By deploying cost telemetry that attributes spend across shared clusters, environments, and applications, capabilities Mavvrik delivers out of the box.
Q4: Why is hybrid infrastructure creating FinOps complexity?
Workloads now span multiple clouds, colocation facilities, and on-prem GPU clusters. Most cost tools assume cloud-only visibility, leaving gaps.
Q5: How does Mavvrik address the challenges raised at FinOpsX?
Mavvrik unifies visibility across cloud, AI, and hybrid environments, provides GPU and model-level cost tracking, and automates allocation for true financial control.