What We Learned at FinOps X 2025: From Dashboards to Decisions

by: Joanne Chu / June, 12 2025

At FinOps X 2025, one message echoed across sessions and conversations: FinOps is growing up. The scope is expanding. The tooling is maturing. And the community is more energized than ever.

But from our vantage point—both at the booth and through the lens of the 2025 CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) report—a more complicated picture emerges. While the industry is talking about continuous optimization, full-stack accountability, and AI-powered action, the reality for most teams looks very different. Remediation is still slow. Manual workflows are still the norm. And too often, dashboards deliver signals that never turn into results.

That tension—between where the industry is headed and where most teams actually are—was the thread running through everything we saw. Here’s what stood out.

FinOps Scope Is Expanding—Whether Teams Are Ready or Not

One of the strongest themes at this year’s event was the broadening scope of FinOps. Conversations around SaaS optimization, internal service allocations, and cross-org chargebacks came up again and again. The FinOps Foundation even previewed new guidance to reflect this shift, including upcoming FOCUS updates to support hybrid and non-cloud services.

That expansion brings new complexity. Many teams are still building the foundations of tagging, anomaly alerting, and cloud governance—yet they’re now being asked to extend those practices to SaaS, business units, and internal tooling.

It’s a shift we’ve been anticipating at CloudBolt, where our focus has been on connecting cloud, SaaS, private infrastructure, and Kubernetes into a cohesive optimization model. That broader lens felt more validated than ever this year.

Small Teams, Big Expectations

One of the most consistent themes in breakout sessions: FinOps teams are small. Often just one or two people. And given current budgets, most aren’t expecting that to change.

To scale, organizations are adopting extended team models—like the “Friends of FinOps” program at Starbucks or “Efficiency Champions” at Reddit—where FinOps responsibilities are distributed across engineering, finance, and operations.

But even with this support, many teams described being stuck in time-consuming workflows that depend on human follow-up. What one panelist called “manual automation” felt like a shared pain point—where tasks are technically repeatable, but far from streamlined.

It’s a pattern we hear from customers as well, and one that reinforces why automation isn’t just a performance upgrade—it’s a necessity for sustainable FinOps.

Dashboards Are Better. But Action Is Still Slow.

FinOps X showed real progress in visibility tooling. Many vendors showcased slick dashboards, improved alerting, and stronger tagging hygiene.

But while these advances are meaningful, they don’t automatically close the loop. According to our 2025 CII report, 58% of organizations still take weeks or longer to act on cloud waste—even when the issue is visible.

That disconnect came up often in our booth conversations. Visibility has improved, but prioritization, approval flows, and execution still lag. Teams don’t lack signals—they lack capacity to act on them quickly.

That’s why we’ve focused on policy-based automation: helping teams define thresholds, evaluate risk in real time, and trigger actions without relying on manual follow-up. It’s not a silver bullet, but it meaningfully shortens the distance between signal and savings.

FOCUS Is Starting to Deliver on Its Promise

A year ago, FOCUS (the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) felt like a rising standard. This year, it felt more like a movement. New contributors like Databricks, Alibaba Cloud, and Grafana joined in, and several sessions showed early examples of teams leveraging FOCUS for cleaner data and faster reporting.

There’s still work to be done, but the progress is encouraging. Standardized cost data isn’t just a win for reporting—it lays the groundwork for automation and cross-cloud analysis.

CloudBolt’s reporting framework already uses FOCUS to normalize usage across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, and it was encouraging to see a broader push toward that same kind of interoperability across the industry.

AI Is Everywhere. Execution Still Isn’t.

AI was one of the most discussed topics this year—from anomaly detection to forecast modeling to GenAI-driven reporting. But most conversations, both onstage and off, focused on generating insights—not acting on them.

There was interest in real-time decisioning and automated remediation, but most teams admitted they’re still in early stages. Execution remains largely manual, and AI’s role is still emerging in day-to-day workflows.

That gap is something we’ve been working to close. Our approach to AI centers not just on smarter insights, but on helping systems respond—whether through policy enforcement, risk scoring, or embedded automation. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s a direction we believe the entire industry is heading toward.

SaaS Optimization Is the Next Frontier

SaaS stood out as one of the most talked-about challenges. As SaaS spend continues to grow, more teams are trying to apply FinOps principles beyond cloud infrastructure—and finding that visibility and control are often lacking.

Sessions touched on fragmented tooling, unclear ownership, and the difficulty of managing SaaS across business units. There’s a growing sense that the next wave of FinOps maturity will hinge on how well teams can bring SaaS into the fold.

That shift has come up more frequently in our own conversations, too. It’s why we’ve partnered with CloudEagle through our Technology Alliance Program—to help teams get a more complete picture of their SaaS usage and spending alongside their cloud environments. The goal is the same: better visibility, better accountability, and ultimately, better decisions.

It’s still early for a lot of organizations, but the interest is clearly growing—and the need is only becoming more urgent.

Final Thoughts

Last year at FinOps X, we described the event as a “home” for weirdos like us—practitioners working through the realities of adoption, evangelism, and scaling FinOps. That energy was still there this year, but it came with a new sense of urgency. The ambition has grown. So have the stakes.

But as our CII report shows, there’s still a significant execution gap. Even as the community rallies around advanced tooling and expanded scope, many teams are still working through foundational challenges. The desire to mature is real. The culture is taking shape. But the ability to act—quickly, confidently, and at scale—still lags behind.

That’s why we’re focused on building for that next phase. Because visibility matters—but action is what drives outcomes.

Close the loop on cloud cost decisions