FinOps in 2026: Focus on savings, and you’re behind.

I walk into your apartment, and the lights are on. You ask me to help you save money, so I turn them off. Great – you’ve saved a few cents on your electricity bill. Tomorrow, I come back, and the lights are back on. I turn them off again. And we have a Groundhog Day situation.

This is how most organisations still practise FinOps. They pay someone to turn off the lights every time they go on – without ever asking why the lights are on in the first place. Was it intentional? Are they on an automatic timer? Is someone afraid to turn them off? And, more importantly, is there value in having them on?

You get where I’m going with this...A cost‑saving‑focus fixes a symptom, but to react in the right way, you need to know what the problem is (or if there even is one) – that is FinOps. And in 2026, you need actual FinOps because continuously fiddling with the lights isn't just inefficient, it’s unsustainable.

FinOps needs to shift focus – to value

if there’s one message I keep repeating now, it’s this: you can be spending exactly the same amount of money and still be ‘doing FinOps well’. Because it’s not about bill size, it’s about the value you get from that spend. And most organisations don’t have visibility into what that value is.

To go back to the apartment – let's say one room has a series of industrial-strength lights that are expensive to run. You can cut costs immediately by removing some and replacing the remainder with cheaper, energy-efficient bulbs. Technically, you’ve solved the cost problem. But why were the expensive lights there in the first place? Maybe that room needs to be super-visible for security reasons. In which case, the extra spend aligned with the strategy, so there was nothing to optimise. The problem comes when you use the expensive lighting without ever questioning why or whether there’s strategic alignment.

FinOps shouldn't tell you which lightbulb to use, it should help you be honest about why you’re using different ones in different places.

AI, data and security are forcing FinOps to grow up

AI, data and security are important signals of whether investment decisions align with strategy or whether you’re paying for capability simply because you can. If FinOps doesn’t force a value conversation in these 3 areas this year, you’ll always end up back at the light switch.

AI has broken the old FinOps mentality

AI is the accelerant making the cost-saving mentality go up in smoke because it’s so easy to spend without intent. You can burn serious money without anyone consciously thinking about whether their query provides value. Using AI to replace human judgement for trivial tasks may save seconds, but does that efficiency deliver ROI?

AI also makes value attribution harder. When an AI platform is used across teams and use cases, who’s generating value and who’s wasting tokens? Without a clear value framework, you can’t allocate costs effectively, prioritise use cases or decide where AI genuinely belongs within workflows.

There’s a temptation to solve this with guardrails – blocking behaviours, limiting usage and switching off features to control spend. But guardrails risk killing innovation, so AI use can’t be a simple yes/no decision. Again, that’s why you need a value framework – because FinOps for AI can't be about restricting usage, it needs to be about understanding what usage matters, and why.

Data costs are about people and process, not storage

The next big problem area this year is data – storage, data pipelines, logs and metrics are exploding. But if we’re being honest, the services themselves are optimised; the inefficiency is people- and process-related rather than technical.

Most organisations don’t know:

• What data they have
• Who owns it
• How long they need it
• How often it’s used
• How fast needs to be retrieved
• What value it generates

So they keep everything – for a long time, at high‑performance tiers, ‘just in case. That’s not a tooling problem, it’s a decision‑making problem – so FinOps must now address it at that level.

Tighter security isn’t always better

The same applies to security and observability. Yes, threats are increasing and compliance requirements are rising – but relevance still matters. I’ve seen organisations spend more on being ‘secure by default’ in the cloud than on the entire workload they’re protecting – without ever asking whether that security level makes sense.

Therefore, FinOps’ role must go far beyond cost visibility and allocation – and ask challenging questions like:

• What risks are we mitigating?
• What value does this control provide to the organisation?
• Is the cost proportionate?

When you put the controls into a strategy-aligned framework like this, you surface the value you’re getting and can take informed steps on what to optimise.

Stop reflexively turning off the lights

Turning off lights is easy; understanding why they’re on requires context and strategic thinking. That’s why FinOps has to move upstream:

• From reacting to bill shock to shaping decisions
• From audits to intent
• From savings to value

And that means accepting that sometimes the right result isn’t a savings percentage, it’s confidence your investment is well-spent.

You can still turn off lights when needed, but you can toggle those switches in-house with people who have the knowledge and power to make those changes on an ongoing basis. The value from external FinOps experts comes from helping the organisation:

• Understand its strategy
• Articulate value within that strategic context
• Shape people and processes to realise that value intentionally

If your FinOps programme doesn’t help you understand this, it’s no longer fit for purpose. And given your increasingly complex cloud/data/AI ecosystem, pretending otherwise will cost you far more than any light left on ever could.