Prudential Financial VP: ‘Traditional FinOps is dead’

Traditional FinOps, which brings together an organization’s finance and tech teams to help manage cloud and tech spending, may now be a thing of the past.

That’s according to Pooja Kumar, Prudential Financial VP of cloud strategy and transformation, who took the stage during FinOps X 2026 to discuss the impact of AI on the longtime framework.

“Traditional FinOps is dead,” Kumar said during a keynote. “Not FinOps the discipline, not FinOps the community, but FinOps the way we’ve been doing it for the last many, many years. And if I can be brutally honest, that was dying even way before AI came into existence.”

The times are a-changing. FinOps is transforming rapidly, evolving beyond just cloud spend as practitioners focus on controlling their AI expenditures. According to the FinOps Foundation’s annual State of FinOps report, 98% of practitioners now manage AI spend.

Frederik Pohl, VP and head of FinOps and data solutions at SAP, told the audience at FinOps X that AI breaks the FinOps cloud playbook because of fundamental differences between spend related to it and cloud spend. While cloud resources are priced “pretty linear,” Pohl said AI is much more volatile and can be harder to forecast.

“While traditional FinOps optimizes infrastructure, FinOps for AI optimizes the outcome of each token,” Pohl said.

Game changer. As more businesses turn their attention to AI spend, FinOps professionals are increasingly stepping into center stage, said Accenture Managing Director Mike Eisenstein.

“Many of you know you’re in the spotlight right now like never before, and for some of you it’s yet to come,” Eisenstein said. “But in any case, I believe this is actually our moment.”

In today’s landscape, Eisenstein said it’s now important for FinOps teams to “understand the business like never before.”

“A lot of us are a gate that you have to go through to provision resources, or a reporting function, or the team that tells you to turn stuff off to save money. We need to show up differently,” Eisenstein said, adding professionals can do so by displaying “empathy for the business.”

“We need to speak the language of the business when we talk about tokenomics to senior leaders,” Eisenstein said. “We have to speak in terms of projects and programs, initiatives, products, channels, and partnerships. Don’t talk in terms of environments, workloads, or providers.”

Kumar said FinOp pros can stay ahead of changing times by automating things like tagging compliance and chargeback prep.

“If you want to be indispensable in the age of AI, lean into value creation,” Kumar said. “Lean into token economics.”

Additionally, FinOp pros need to be willing to evolve as the industry changes: “Stay open,” Kumar said, “because the only competitive edge that no vendor can sell you and no competitor can give you is your willingness to keep learning, because the best education to give yourself is an open and curious mind.”