Dive Brief:
- AI cost management is the most desired skillset among financial operations teams, according to 58% of businesses polled by the FinOps Foundation for its annual State of FinOps 2026 report. Nearly all of the 1,192 survey respondents are working to manage AI spend compared with 63% in 2025.
- FinOps has risen to the C-suite with 78% of teams reporting to the CTO or CIO up from 61% in 2023, the survey found. FinOps teams “overwhelmingly report into the technology organization, with a dotted line to finance,” the report said.
- Over the years, FinOps has grown into a multitechnology practice, according to the report. Nine out of 10 practitioners manage SaaS, up from 65% in 2025. Meanwhile, 64% manage licensing compared with 49% in 2025, and 57% manage private cloud, up from 39%.
Dive Insight:
Managing AI costs has become a pivotal concern for enterprises as adoption takes off, helping to accelerate an ongoing expansion of FinOps beyond cloud.
AI not only “dominates the forward-looking agenda,” according to the FinOps Foundation report, but has expanded the scope of FinOps to become a pivotal player in IT decision-making.
FinOps leaders are more frequently participating in strategic provider negotiations, assessing long-term investment decisions and providing technology due diligence during mergers and acquisitions, the report found. Practitioners aligned with CTOs and CIOs indicated two to four times more influence over technology selection, according to survey respondents.
FinOps has become anchored in technology leadership as teams reporting to the CFO dropped to 8%, the report found.
“This signals that FinOps is increasingly viewed as a technology capability tied to architecture, engineering and platform decisions, not just financial reporting or cost optimization,” according to the report.
Global IT spend is expected to increase 9.8% year over year, surpassing $6 trillion in 2026, according to Gartner projections published in October.
“The cost of software is going up and both the cost of features and functionality is going up as well thanks to GenAI,” John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said in a press release.
