There’s a good interview making the rounds. BizTech sat down with IBM’s James Stevenson to talk about how financial institutions can get a handle on cloud and AI costs. The advice is solid: get visibility, kill idle resources, tighten governance, tag everything. And pull finance and engineering into the same room.
I don’t disagree with it. But I read the whole piece and noticed where the gravity pulls: control costs, reduce waste, bring down spend. The headline says it (‘Q&A: IBM Expert on How Financial Institutions Can Control Cloud Costs With FinOps Practices’.) And that, I’d argue politely, is aiming at the wrong target.
To his credit, Stevenson says correctly: Efforts as cost control are “not simply about reducing spend.” He even points to unit economics, cost per transaction, cost per account. That’s the good stuff.
But it’s buried under the idea that still treats AI spend as a cost to be contained rather than an investment to be returned. For a CFO, this is an important distinction.
Curbing spend is a budgeting reflex but ROI is the actual job
Cutting AI spend is easy. You can do it right now: turn off the model, cap the credits, freeze the pilot, and spend goes down. So does any chance of finding out what was working.
The question that actually moves a business isn’t “how do we spend less?” It’s “what did this spend produce, for whom, and at what margin?” One is about taking the temperature. The other is a strategy.
And the data says almost nobody can answer the second question yet. CloudZero’s new survey report, Finding the ROI of AI: The Finance Perspective, finds that only about one in five (22%) finance teams can tie AI spend to outcomes.
CloudZero’s research also found that a third of companies overshoot their AI budgets by more than 20%. Forrester expects enterprises to defer a quarter of planned AI spend to 2027 because finance can’t connect what they spent to what it produced.
The problem isn’t about waste, it’s about returns. And you don’t really fix a returns problem by spending less. You fix it by knowing which dollars are paying off and putting more behind them.
Report
Finance needs to prove AI’s return: CloudZero report
260 senior finance leaders (more than half CFOs) told us why the speed of seeing AI spend, not the size of it, separates who pulls ahead on AI from who gets burned.
What a CFO should actually do
If you want to lead on AI economics instead of just policing them, three moves matter.
First, change the question you ask. Stop opening the AI review with “where’s the waste?” Open it with “what did we get?” Waste is a line item but return is the reason you’re investing at all. The teams that win the next year or two will be the ones asking the second question, in every budget meeting.
Second, attribute spend to outcomes you’re accountable for. Tokens, credits, and compute hours are the input meter, but they’re not the answer. (And yes, some providers are claiming they’re shining a light on ROI by providing this alone, but that’s not the case.)
Pick the units your business is actually measured on (such as cost per customer, cost per product, cost per transaction, cost per strategic bet) and connect spend directly to them. That moves beyond usage into an AI ROI answer. It’s also the work a financial control plane exists to do: to join every AI dollar to the outcome it produced, across every provider.
Third, reallocate toward what’s working. The point of all that visibility isn’t getting to a smaller bill. It’s a smarter one. Once you can see which investments return and which ones don’t, fund the winners. Which would you rather have: profitable AI investment, or a lower invoice? I believe most CFOs want the former.
Reframe the problem
Controlling AI spend is not the CFO’s highest-order problem. Spending well is. The companies that pull ahead won’t be the ones who spent the least on AI. They’ll be the ones who can prove what every dollar returned, and act on it before the quarter closes.
Ask yourself: Are you in the financial leadership seat to control things when you’re afraid of the bill? Or are you in the seat to win by generating ROI on what you (and your company’s teams) spend?
Full disclosure: this is the problem we built CloudZero to solve. But you don’t need us to change the question. You just need to start asking the right one.
