FinOps in Action cover art

FinOps in Action

FinOps in Action

Written by: PointFive
Listen for free

Welcome to FinOps in Action! Join host, Taylor Houck, Each week, as he sits down with FinOps experts to explore the toughest challenges between FinOps and Engineering. This show is brought to you by PointFive - empowering teams to optimize cloud costs with deep detection and remediation tools that drive action.PointFive Economics
Episodes
  • Engineering Enterprise FinOps ft. Piotr Kuczmera | Ep # 77

    Engineering Enterprise FinOps ft. Piotr Kuczmera | Ep # 77
    Jul 16 2026
    What if the biggest mistake your FinOps program makes is skipping the requirements phase entirely?In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Piotr Kuczmera, Head of FinOps at ZF Group, to unpack how he built a FinOps practice from scratch at a 150,000 person global enterprise, and why the first question every organization should ask is not "how do we cut costs" but "what exactly do we need?"Piotr shares how a single report request from his manager five years ago turned into a full scale internal FinOps platform, a hub and spoke operating model across 15 to 20 business units, and a team built on the combination of FinOps practitioners and data engineers working side by side.Here is what they covered: Why FinOps is more than cost savings. Piotr explains that equating FinOps with cost optimization alone leads to failed implementations, and that starting with a clear requirements conversation, like a tailor fitting a suit to the right occasion, is what sets a practice up for long term success.How chargeback became the turning point. When ZF connected individual names to specific budgets and sent real invoices, something clicked. Engineers and budget holders stopped asking about aggregate project spend and started asking "why am I paying this much and how do I reduce it?"The case for building your own platform. ZF evaluated the major third party FinOps tools and walked away. Licensing costs, limited multi-cloud support, and a lack of flexibility in adapting to existing finance and procurement processes all pointed toward a homegrown solution built on native cloud tooling and a BI layer they already owned.The hub and spoke model for FinOps at scale. At the center sits a core team of FinOps consultants and data engineers. In each business unit, a nominated budget owner and a FinOps champion bridge the gap between central strategy and local execution.AI for FinOps, not just FinOps for AI. Piotr is most energized by how AI can automate repetitive FinOps workflows and take recommendations beyond basic CPU and memory parameters to consider commitment connections, usage patterns, and resource families all at once. He also sees FinOps as a function that should open doors for AI adoption, not slow it down.FinOps as connective tissue. Across financial colleagues, engineering teams, and business managers, Piotr sees FinOps as the function responsible for translating the right information to the right persona, not flooding finance with VM data, and not giving engineers a budget variance they cannot act on.Chapters:00:00 What Every Company Gets Wrong About FinOps 01:27 Meet Piotr Kuczmera 02:14 FinOps Is Not Just Cost Savings 03:30 Building Trust Across Departments 05:00 The FinOps Team Structure at ZF Group 08:00 Hub and Spoke: Champions and Budget Owners 10:00 Scale and Cadence Across 15 to 20 Categories 12:00 Back to the Beginning: One Report at a Time 14:00 Build vs Buy: The Platform Decision 18:00 Why Ownership of Data Changes Everything 21:00 Chargeback as the Accountability Switch 23:00 Translating FinOps Across Personas 25:00 FinOps as Connective Tissue 26:00 AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI 29:00 Treating AI Spend Like Any Other Cloud Service 30:00 What the Well Tailored FinOps Suit Looks Like in One Year 31:00 From Math Degree to FinOps Leader 33:00 Advice for Early Career FinOps Professionals 34:00 Where to Find PiotrQuote of the Show:"Stay humble and don't be afraid of challenges." - Piotr Kuczmera🎧 Subscribe for more FinOps leadership conversations: https://www.finopsinaction.com/Links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/piotr-kuczmera-59b39712a/Website: https://www.zf.com/usa_canada/en/home/home.htmlWays to Tune In:Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f25a9d18-c12f-4ee4-93f5-2aa96e509b55 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finops-in-action/id1790497808 iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/268443483/ Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/finops-in-action-5958339 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IpjMc3qxDXZAjic5Zq21t Substack: https://finopsinaction.substack.com/ Transistor: finopsinaction.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PointFive_Inc
    Show More Show Less
    35 mins
  • The Price of Cost Awareness ft. Ruby Agarwal | Ep #76

    The Price of Cost Awareness ft. Ruby Agarwal | Ep #76
    Jul 9 2026

    What if the biggest cloud savings opportunity isn't hidden in your infrastructure, but in the decisions made before the first line of code is written?

    In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor sits down with Ruby Agarwal, VP of Engineering at Avaya, whose responsibilities span engineering, DevOps, DevSecOps, CloudOps, and FinOps. Ruby shares how her team reduced cloud spend by 75% in just two months, why visibility matters more than perfect data, and how cost awareness becomes part of engineering culture rather than a one-time optimization project.

    They also explore how AI is changing operational decision-making and why the future of FinOps will depend on balancing innovation with discipline.

    Takeaways:

    • Start with visibility, not spreadsheets of despair. Ruby's team didn't need perfect data to cut 75% of spend, they needed a one-slider view everyone could understand. Skip the 20 page report and focus your team's attention on the handful of buckets driving most of the cost.
    • Cost isn't the enemy, inefficiency is. Turning everything off would bring spending to zero, but that's not the goal. The goal is getting the same performance, reliability, and security for less, not gutting the services delivering value.
    • Build your COGS model before you write code. On Avaya Infinity, Ruby's team defined their cost model before a single line was written, and they publish and measure it every month. Bake cost discipline into the architecture from day one instead of cleaning up after launch.
    • Separate your AI innovation zone from your production zone. Let engineers experiment freely with the most powerful models while building, but production agents don't need the flashiest reasoning model, they need the cheapest one that gets the job done reliably.
    • The skills that carry your career aren't technical. Ruby calls systems thinking, structured decision-making, communication, and connection-building the real differentiators, not soft skills but critical skills. Investing in those early pays off longer than any single technology wave.

    Chapters:

    00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

    01:25 The 75 Percent Story Setup

    01:45 Project Context Multi Cloud

    02:37 Cataloging Costs and Buckets

    03:21 Quick Wins Labs Scheduling

    04:15 Storage Cleanup and Tiering

    04:30 Dashboards Make It Visible

    05:44 Working With Developers

    06:50 Culture Tools and Training

    08:58 Cross Functional Momentum

    10:29 FinOps From Day One

    11:21 Avaya Infinity COGS Model

    13:37 Who Owns Cost Decisions

    15:28 Need Dedicated FinOps

    18:00 80 20 Cost Focus

    21:08 Cost Fear vs Cloud Value

    23:04 Regulated Industry Constraints

    26:38 AI Agents and Model Costs

    32:53 Future of Operational Intelligence

    35:30 Career Advice Beyond Tech

    37:36 Giving Back and Mentoring

    39:23 Closing Thanks and Wrap


    🎧 Subscribe for more FinOps leadership conversations → https://www.finopsinaction.com/

    Quote of the Show:

    • “ Your first cloud cost bill will be dependent on what architectural decisions you have made for your projects.” - Ruby Agarwal

    Links:

    • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubyagarwal/
    • Website: https://www.avaya.com/en/

    Ways to Tune In:

    • Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f25a9d18-c12f-4ee4-93f5-2aa96e509b55
    • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finops-in-action/id1790497808
    • iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/268443483/
    • Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/finops-in-action-5958339
    • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IpjMc3qxDXZAjic5Zq21t
    • Substack: https://finopsinaction.substack.com/
    • Transistor: finopsinaction.com
    • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PointFive_Inc
    Show More Show Less
    41 mins
  • Agentic FinOps and the AI Cost Explosion ft. Pathik Sharma | Ep #76

    Agentic FinOps and the AI Cost Explosion ft. Pathik Sharma | Ep #76
    Jul 2 2026

    What does agentic FinOps actually look like in practice, and how should practitioners start thinking about it?

    Taylor Houck sits down with Pathik Sharma, Cloud Cost Optimization Lead at Google Cloud and Cofounder of their Cloud FinOps practice, to talk about how AI is closing the gap between knowing and doing in FinOps. Pathik shares how teams can hand off low risk tasks like tagging and labeling to AI agents while keeping humans in the loop on anything production related, and offers a four bucket framework for evaluating AI ROI: cost efficiency, productivity, differentiation, and revenue. His take for practitioners: embrace the change, learn the tooling, and let AI handle the friction so you can focus on business value.

    Here’s what we talked about:

    • Don't silo your FinOps practice. Cost optimization doesn't exist in a vacuum. Factor in performance, security, scalability, and capacity from the start, and build tight relationships with platform, SRE, and app teams to get anything done.

    • Use AI agents for the low risk wins first. Start with non-disruptive tasks like tagging and labeling before giving AI autonomy over anything that touches production. Build confidence incrementally.

    • Keep humans in the loop on consequential actions. Have your AI agent create a pull request and route it to the application owner for approval rather than pushing changes directly. The app team still owns uptime.

    • Don't pick your AI model on instinct. Build a golden dataset, define what good looks like, and test models against it. One retail company cut their AI costs from $340K to $17K a month by switching models after running the data.

    • Start from the problem, not the solution. Identify the real friction points your FinOps and engineering teams face, then figure out where AI reduces that friction. Chasing AI for its own sake is how you burn the budget without value.

    Chapters:

    00:46 Meet Pathik Sharma

    01:58 AI Makes FinOps Urgent

    03:09 From Tinkering To Priority

    06:22 Defining Agentic FinOps

    06:33 Culture And The Knowing Doing Gap

    08:56 Kubernetes Agent Example

    10:58 Is It Still FinOps

    12:37 Humans In The Loop

    13:23 Safe Automation With Tagging

    15:07 PR Based Remediation Workflow

    18:14 Trustworthy Recommendations First

    20:58 Build Trust Incrementally

    23:35 Managing AI Spend Beyond Tokens

    27:27 FinOps For AI Framework

    28:32 Retail Case Study Huge Savings

    32:27 ROI Buckets And Closing Advice


    🎧 Subscribe for more FinOps leadership conversations → https://www.finopsinaction.com/


    Quote of the Show:

    • "Embrace the change that is happening and learn it. FinOps holds keys to the kingdom" - Pathik Sharma

    Links:

    • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pathik-sharma/
    • Website: https://pathiksharma.com/

    Ways to Tune In:

    • Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f25a9d18-c12f-4ee4-93f5-2aa96e509b55
    • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finops-in-action/id1790497808
    • iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/268443483/
    • Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/finops-in-action-5958339
    • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IpjMc3qxDXZAjic5Zq21t
    • Substack: https://finopsinaction.substack.com/
    • Transistor: finopsinaction.com
    • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PointFive_Inc
    Show More Show Less
    44 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet