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

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

What if the best FinOps practitioners are the ones who never set out to be FinOps practitioners at all?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Gerard Sanchez, Head of Enterprise Platforms and Cloud Technology at Resolution Life, to unpack what it actually looks like to build a cloud engineering, DevOps, and FinOps practice from absolute zero at a company that was only six months old when he joined. Gerard brings a hardcore infrastructure and networking background to a discipline that too often gets siloed away from engineering, and the results speak for themselves.

Here’s what we talked about:

• Set up automated cost alerts and guardrails from the start. Getting notified about a surprise bill is useful, but building automations that throttle or shut down rogue functions before the cost spiral is where you really want to be.

• Tagging is non-negotiable. If you can't trace spend back to a specific application or team, you'll never have the visibility to make smart optimization decisions.

• Shift FinOps left into the architecture and design phase. Catching cost inefficiencies before they deploy is far more effective than trying to optimize them after the fact.

• Match your cloud services to the actual workload. Before defaulting to high-performance, high-cost infrastructure, pressure-test whether the use case actually demands it. A Toyota Corolla solution often performs just as well as a Bugatti for the average user.

• Keep humans in the loop as you adopt AI. Even as agentic systems get more capable, building strong permissioning, tagging, and auditability into your AI framework now will save you from costly and chaotic surprises later.

Chapters:

00:42 Meeting Gerard Sanchez

01:25 Building from Scratch

02:52 Fast and Good Over Cheap

05:22 The Wake Up Call

07:58 Crawl Walk Run Journey

10:08 Engineering Led FinOps

11:53 Right Sizing Use Cases

14:43 Shifting Left

16:13 AI and Automation

18:46 Agentic AI Architecture

22:12 Trust and Validation

23:45 Managing AI Costs

24:55 The Future of Business

30:31 Building the AI Foundation

32:50 Career Advice

36:58 Closing Thoughts

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

Quote of the Show:

• "I think especially for production environments or environments that are super sensitive, there's always gonna be a human in the loop." — Gerard Sanchez

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerard-r-sanchez/
• Website: https://www.resolutionlife.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

What if the biggest driver of cloud waste isn't what shows up in your billing dashboard?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor sits down with Mike Jaco, who spent years at Mastercard running one of the most sophisticated hybrid cost programs in enterprise technology. A unified TBM and FinOps practice covering a multi-billion dollar technology budget, on-prem and public cloud, under a single common taxonomy.

Mike's core belief: most large organizations will be hybrid forever, and the industry hasn't caught up to what that actually requires.

Here's what they covered:

• Build a common taxonomy before you do anything else. If your technology teams, product teams, and finance teams are using different languages to describe the same thing, no one is having the right conversation. Get everyone onto one shared structure first and everything else gets easier.
• Allocate cost down to the product level, not just the business unit. Stopping at the business unit level leaves too much room for ambiguity and not enough room for accountability. The more granular your allocation, the clearer it becomes who owns what and what action to take.
• Most large organizations will be hybrid forever, so build for it. Regulation, data sovereignty, and steady state workloads mean a full cloud migration is not realistic for most enterprises. Build your measurement framework to cover both worlds under one taxonomy or you are only ever telling half the story.
• Savings that stay in the team drive more action than savings that disappear. If engineers know that any efficiency they find gets reinvested into their own backlog rather than returned to a central budget, the motivation to optimize shifts completely. Self-funding growth is a more powerful incentive than a cost reduction target.
• FinOps is a people problem first and a data problem second. When an engineer is not making a change, it is almost never because they want to waste money. They are overloaded, they have competing priorities, or the task does not benefit them. Solve for the people dynamic and the technical changes follow.

Chapters:

00:11 Meet Mike Jaco

01:11 Why Hybrid Is Forever

01:38 Regulation Drives Reality

02:55 On Prem vs Cloud Economics

03:28 The Apples to Apples Problem

04:58 Building a Common Taxonomy

06:21 Making Tech Less a Black Box

06:59 Why Allocate to Product Level

07:13 Accountability Creates Action

08:36 TBM vs FinOps Actions

10:21 18 Months vs 3 Months

11:45 Granularity vs Peanut Butter

13:16 Controllable vs Uncontrollable Spend

14:45 Carbon Becomes a Currency

17:11 Cloud Carbon Data Gap

20:39 Cost vs Carbon Tradeoffs

29:54 AI Spend and FinOps Future

37:39 Career Next Steps and Advice

39:47 People First FinOps Lessons

41:22 Where to Find Mike

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

Quote of the Show:

• “You can do more with the same budget.” - Mike Jaco

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-jaco/

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

What if the biggest cost problem in your organization never shows up on your cloud bill?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck sits down with Kumar Singirikonda, Director of DevOps Engineering at Toyota Financial Services, FinOps Foundation board member, and author of the DevOps Automation Cookbook. Kumar makes the case that FinOps as we know it is only the first chapter, and the next chapter belongs to self-healing systems, AI-driven remediation, and a class of costs that traditional cost reports have never been able to surface.

Here is what they covered:

• The hidden costs that never appear on your dashboard. Track your direct cloud expenses all you want, but your biggest operational costs are invisible. A single 30 minute outage won't change your infrastructure bill, yet it pulls in engineering teams, delays releases, and creates support volume that compounds for days.
• From cost control to value creation. Stop asking how to reduce cloud spend and start asking how to maximize business value from your engineering investments. When you do that, cost optimization becomes an outcome of operational maturity rather than the goal itself.
• What a self healing platform actually looks like. When a routing issue triggers a 404 spike, your system should detect the anomaly, correlate it with the recent deployment, invoke a remediation workflow, and execute a rollback in under two minutes without a human touching a keyboard. That is what operational maturity actually looks like in practice.
• AI is not a silver bullet. A model alone does not create operational intelligence. Connect AI to your observability platforms, automation workflows, and remediation playbooks, and that is where the real value comes from.

Chapters:

00:50 Meet Kumar Singarikkonda

01:59 Kumar’s Journey to FinOps

02:33 Hidden Operational Costs

04:41 From Cost Control to Value

06:55 Headcount vs Cloud Bill

07:54 Unknown Costs in Incidents

10:30 Measuring Engineering Efficiency

13:13 Self-Healing Systems Defined

13:39 How Self-Healing Works

16:23 404 Spike Self-Heal Example

20:30 Where AI Fits In

21:07 Agentic Workflows Over Hype

24:21 Engineering Efficiency Discipline

26:49 Building Cost-Aware Culture

29:56 Leadership Lessons at Toyota

32:11 Book Community and Closing

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

Quote of the Show:"The biggest operational cost problem today is inefficiency rather than infrastructure pricing. Organizations that reduce operational friction unlock far greater long-term value than organizations focused only on reducing the compute spend." - Kumar Singirikonda

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kumarsingirikonda
• Website: https://www.toyota.com/usa
• Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Automation-Cookbook-Harness-automation/dp/9355519060

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

Are "bad tagging" and "unused resources" really the problem, or just the symptoms of a bigger one?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sit down with senior FinOps manager Chitra Jadhav to explore what it truly takes to build a FinOps practice that lasts not just one that generates a list of recommendations nobody acts on.

Drawing on eight years of building FinOps programs from the ground up across six or more organizations, Chitra explains how governance, culture, and cross functional collaboration are the real foundations of cloud cost optimization and why FinOps is only as powerful as the trust and authority an organization is willing to give it.

From Architecture Review Boards to Production Readiness Reviews, this conversation unpacks how FinOps can embed itself into the engineering lifecycle before waste ever happens, and why the shift to AI spend makes getting those basics right more urgent than ever.

Here’s what we talked about:

• Why organizational recognition and governance are the prerequisites for any FinOps program to succeed
• How to assess FinOps maturity using the FinOps Foundation framework as a starting point
• Why FinOps is a team sport and how to engage finance, engineering, procurement, and application teams
• What ARBs and Production Readiness Reviews are and how FinOps earns a seat at the table
• How to approach optimization when native cloud provider recommendations run dry
• The importance of the FinOps champion model when working across large engineering organizations

Chapters:

00:47 Meet Chitra Jadhav

01:56 Why FinOps Matters

03:37 Starting From Scratch

03:52 Maturity Assessment Basics

04:48 Stakeholder Engagement Model

05:56 Where FinOps Reports

07:16 Defining Governance

08:14 FinOps Checkpoints ARB PRR

10:42 What Is an ARB

12:51 Running ARB Without Bloat

16:38 Shift Left to Optimization

18:22 Champion Model and Visibility

21:05 Authority Trust and Culture

25:29 Realistic Goals and Commitments

29:20 Beyond Native Recommendations AI

33:02 AI Spend and Future Wrap

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

Quote of the Show:

"Instead of paying that money and incurring that waste, you are taking some steps proactively by making sure that you are present at these discussions." - Chitra Jadhav

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chitrajadhav/
• Website: https://www.rogers.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

What if your biggest cloud inefficiency isn’t how much you’re using, but how long your workloads are running?

In this special episode of FinOps in Action, PointFive’s Co-Founder and CPO, Gal Ben David sits down with Matan Ben-Ishay, leading FP&A, Engineering, and Cloud Infrastructure at Credit Karma, to unpack a real world cloud efficiency discovery that led to tens of millions of dollars in savings without reducing usage or cutting performance.

Matan shares how a simple assumption about “cheaper” CPUs quietly inflated costs, why billing data alone didn’t reveal the problem, and how true FinOps impact only happens when finance and engineering work side by side.

We also covered how FinOps wins happen at the intersection of finance, engineering, and product and how understanding accounting concepts is a career advantage in FinOps.

Here’s what we talked about:

• How a hidden GCP dataflow inefficiency cost tens of millions until Matan sat with engineers and discovered faster CPUs actually cost less per hour
• Why rigid governance policies backfire and how flexible guidelines that encourage engineers to evaluate their actual workload needs prevent waste
• Why FinOps professionals need to understand accounting concepts (depreciation, amortization, commitments)
• The emerging need for cloud efficiency engineers embedded in teams who can bridge the gap between FinOps strategy and hands on optimization work
• How running parallel tests of old vs. new approaches proves value to skeptical engineers and turns short-term testing costs into long-term savings
• The structural friction between engineering OKRs (focused on launches and reliability) and cost efficiency, and why engineers should treat cloud spend like any other company resource

Chapters:

00:00 FinOps Is Everyone’s Job

00:16 Special Episode Setup

01:27 Meet Matan Ben-Ishay

02:14 The Incentives Mistake

05:12 Speed vs Cost in AI

07:30 How to Motivate Engineers

10:19 Scaling Best Practices Org-Wide

13:27 Where FinOps Should Sit

18:02 Guardrails and Shared Ownership

20:55 Fleet Guardrails Matter

21:38 Hidden Waste Over Time

22:47 Can We Prevent Waste

25:56 Tactical vs Strategic Waste

27:00 FinOps on GCP Reality

29:14 Commitment Forecasting Playbook

32:30 FinOps Parenting Hacks

35:31 Personal Picks and Growth

37:53 Closing and Where to Connect

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

Quote of the Show:

• “We need those cloud efficiency engineers in order to understand.” - Matan Ben-Ishay

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matan-ben-ishay/
• Website: https://www.creditkarma.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/@PointFiveCloudCostEfficiency