State of FinOps 2025: Teams Expand Scope While Battling Resource ConstraintsState of FinOps 2025: Teams Expand Scope While Battling Resource Constraints

The FinOps Foundation has been tracking and advancing the state of FinOps over the past five years.

The 2025 edition of the State of FinOps Report reveals a dramatic expansion of FinOps practices beyond traditional cloud spending, as organizations grapple with the financial implications of AI adoption and proliferating SaaS applications. The survey, representing organizations responsible for more than $69 billion in cloud spend, indicates a significant shift in how companies approach technology financial management.

Key findings:

"The spread of FinOps into additional areas of cloud infrastructure — SaaS, licensing, private cloud, etc. — was a big reveal to us, not necessarily that it was happening, but to the extent that it was already happening and then how fast it is expected to ramp up," J.R. Storment, executive director at the FinOps Foundation, told ITPro Today. "It showed us that the majority of organizations doing FinOps are not only doing it for cloud infrastructure but for a lot of areas of variable technology spend."

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IT Teams Are Spread Thin, but They Can Still Optimize

The State of FinOps Report shows teams are stretching thin across over 12 capabilities, regardless of whether they were just doing cloud.

"We see evidence of teams being spread thin, and that is a risk," Storment said.

With FinOps for the cloud, a lot of teams are looking for optimization, which makes sense given their maturity, he noted. With FinOps for other areas of spend, such as SaaS, AI, and private cloud, organizational priorities are around more fundamental things like understanding costs.

"With teams spread too thin, there's always a risk of things being done, but not really being done well enough to move the needle," Storment said. "At whatever state an organization is in its FinOps maturity, focusing on initiatives that make a measurable difference is key."

The Challenge of AI Spend Management

The report found that 63% of respondents now manage AI spend. AI has some unique challenges compared to traditional cloud resources.

"A unique challenge to managing AI spend is how fast GenAI spend increased for many. No other technology wave is advancing as fast as this one, at least not in the area of spend," Storment said. "No other technology wave is being used so broadly outside of engineering teams, creating challenges and opportunities for collaboration."

Related:Cloud Cost Management and FinOps Will Accelerate IT Operations in 2025

Additionally, he noted that AI cost tends to be supplementary, not substitute, so the cost of AI is added to existing costs, not replacing some other category of spend. As such, Storment said it is easy to see how companies may get in too deep, too quickly, or they won't actually be capturing all of the areas of AI spend that can sprout up around an organization. 

"Whether it is skills or tools, we see an increasing need for visibility into AI spend and then controls," he said. "The rise of agentic AI will create even more streams of spend."