The FinOps Framework for AI: Governance, Visibility, and the New Economics of AI
FinOps for AI — Article 2 of 4 The previous article in this series established the diagnosis: AI workloads have broken the traditional cloud cost model, and the FinOps practices inherited from the infrastructure era are structurally inadequate to govern the economics of tokens, inferences, and autonomous agents. The deterioration of the Cloud Efficiency Rate is not a tooling problem. It is a governance model problem. If the first article explained why the cloud efficiency paradox exists, this article explains why solving it requires a new governance and measurement foundation. The article does not yet describe the full operating model of FinOps for AI. It defines the foundation on which such an operating model must be built: governance, visibility, attribution, unit economics, and adaptive budgeting.