FinOps teams have been expected to understand millions of dollars in cloud and AI spend using tools that a handful of (usually technical) specialists can operate. Dashboards, filters, exports, and SQL have been the norm.
That era is over. CloudZero is now bringing AI directly into the FinOps workflow so anyone in the business can ask natural-language questions about cloud and AI spend, and get accurate answers back from the platform.
To be clear, this is no longer just a finance or engineering requirement. According to the FinOps Foundation: “Access to accurate data and powerful tools is the lifeblood of effective FinOps management … putting the relevant data in the path of the relevant stakeholders” is imperative.
With CloudZero’s innovations, we’re doing more than just tracking AI spend, we’re also using AI to make FinOps radically more accessible, faster, and smarter.
AI For FinOps: CloudZero Intelligence Inside The Platform
The first major shift is how people interact with cost data. Instead of navigating complex filters or memorizing the right dashboard, users can now use CloudZero Intelligence to talk to their spend.
Take a tour of CloudZero’s newest capabilities:
Ask questions like a human, get answers like an analyst
With our new Ask Advisor capability, CloudZero becomes a FinOps assistant that understands your environment. You can ask things like:
- “What caused our AWS bill to jump last week?”
- “Which products drove the increase in OpenAI spend this month?”
- “Show me our biggest optimization opportunities right now.”
- “How is our Anthropic and OpenAI spend trending this year?”
CloudZero Advisor will respond with clear, contextual, actual cost data – the charts, breakdowns, and explanations you can act on or paste directly into a deck.
Natural language filtering
We’ve also introduced natural language filtering so teams can explore spend the way they think:
- “How is our weekly spend trending over the past 6 months?”
- “Show me the AI workloads over $10K last month.”
- “Break down our Q4 EC2 spend by team.”
We enable you to stop wrestling with drop-downs and filter trees; CloudZero lets you describe what you want and it does the heavy lifting.
Bringing FinOps intelligence to your tools with MCP server
Finally, CloudZero MCP Server lets you securely expose CloudZero’s semantic layer and cost model to the AI tools you already use, including conversational AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, directly inside your IDE with tools such as Cursor and Claude Code, or from autonomous agents operating on your behalf. Teams can use MCP-compatible clients and agents to query governed, real-time cost data from their CloudZero account wherever AI work is happening.
That means:
- Your own LLM clients can securely tap into CloudZero’s cost intelligence
- FinOps context can show up in the tools your teams already live in
- You don’t have to rewire your processes to benefit from AI
This is AI for FinOps in action; it makes cost insight instant, conversational, and available to technical and business roles.
FinOps For AI: Bringing LLM And AI Costs Under Control
The other side of the CloudZero innovation story is just as important: FinOps for AI. AI is rapidly becoming one of the most expensive and least understood parts of modern infrastructure. And spending is skyrocketing.
Most organizations today can’t cleanly answer:
- How much they spend on AI across providers
- Which teams, products, or customers are driving that spend
- What their unit economics look like (per 1,000 tokens, per model, per workflow)
CloudZero is closing that gap.
LiteLLM integration: one lens for hundreds of models
With our new LiteLLM integration, CloudZero can ingest from hundreds of LLMs, from OpenAI and Anthropic to other commercial and open-source models, and pull AI usage and spend into the same cost model that powers our cloud visibility.
This lets you:
- See AI spend alongside AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, and SaaS
- Allocate AI costs to teams, products, features, or customers
- Understand metrics like cost per 1,000 tokens or inference-level cost metrics
- Compare model and provider economics in one place
It’s everything FinOps has done for cloud, now extended to AI workloads.
One Unified View Of Cloud And AI Economics
Combining AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI gives you something powerful:
- AI features that let anyone ask questions and get instant insight
- A FinOps platform that sees your full footprint: cloud, SaaS, and AI
- Unit economics that help leaders judge whether AI investments are actually paying off
Now, a CTO can ask:
“What’s our cost per 1,000 tokens for GPT-4o, and how has it changed over the last three months?”
A product leader can ask:
“What’s the infrastructure cost per AI-powered feature for our enterprise customers?”
A CFO can ask:
“Are our AI workloads improving margin or quietly eroding it?”
And with CloudZero, they get an answer they can trust, right away.
Why This Matters Now
Cloud and AI services already represent some of the largest, fastest-growing expenses on the P&L. AI will only intensify that trend.
The companies that win in this era won’t be the ones who simply “do AI.” They’ll be the ones who can explain AI, in dollars, in unit economics, and in business outcomes, and adjust at the speed of change.
That’s what our newest release is about. We’re putting AI into FinOps, and FinOps into AI, so you can innovate aggressively and protect your margins.
If you want to see how this looks in your world, contact us to discuss or request a demo.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
