FinOps practitioners find themselves pressured to embed the financial context earlier in the engineering life cycle, rather than later in the regulatory process.
This is according to the FinOps Foundation’s 2026 State of FinOps report, which includes responses from more than 1,100 practitioners.
They found that teams want a FinOps context early in the lifecycle so they can make informed decisions before deployment, rather than adjusting costs after billing. As a result, pre-deployment architecture guidance is becoming a highly desirable force when looking for FinOps tools.
“FinOps is no longer just explaining past spending. It’s shaping future technology decisions before a commitment is made,” the company wrote in a report.
The study also revealed that the FinOps function extends beyond efficiency and effectiveness into areas such as management, forecasting, organizational alignment, and managing emerging technology areas.
One of those growing areas is managing the use of AI, which 98% of respondents now do, compared to just 31% two years ago. Additionally, 90% now manage SaaS (up from 65% by 2025), 64% manage licensing (49% by 2025), 57% manage private cloud (39% by 2025), and 48% manage data center costs (12% by 2025). Twenty-eight percent also now track labor costs.
These trends inspired the FinOps Foundation to change its mission from “Developing People Who Own Cloud Value” to “Developing People Who Own Technology Value.”
FinOps practitioners also work closely with IT Financial Management, IT Asset Management, and IT Service Management teams, highlighting the growing influence of FinOps across the organization. There is also a growing trend towards FinOps working closely with platform engineering teams.
Most organizations (60%) run their FinOps teams in one place, with FinOps champions embedded in different teams. 21 percent use hub-and-spoke models and less than 10% use split teams. Overall team sizes remain small, with organizations managing over $100M typically averaging 8-10 employees and 3-10 contractors.
Finally, the report found that the FinOps Open Cost and Use Specification, or FOCUS, continues to gain momentum. All major clouds now generate FOCUS data natively, and 68% of large spenders (those managing more than $100M) are using or evaluating FOCUS data and another 18% plan to do so.
Top applications for updates to the specification include broader support for AI workloads, data centers, deep cloud, and PaaS/SaaS.
“FinOps has completely expanded into technology value management, and the FinOps Foundation has followed to show the scope of what practitioners are doing in the industry today, what impact they have, and how they are using FinOps to drive greater value in technology investments,” said JR Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation. “As companies pursue transformation through AI, and the resulting increase in AI spending, FinOps processes will become critical to empower c-level decisions about strategic technology investments across all types of infrastructure”
