How this 'FinOps for AI' certification can help you tackle surging AI costs

SAN DIEGO — At its annual FinOps X meeting, the FinOps Foundation announced the launch of “FinOps Certified: FinOps for AI.” The new training and certification program is designed to equip FinOps practitioners with the skills needed to manage and optimize the rapidly growing costs associated with artificial intelligence (AI) in cloud environments.

This skillset is important now, and will be more important soon. Today you might be paying $20 a month for AI services; soon, prices are likely to increase 10-fold. Why? As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted recently , “We are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions!” ChatGPT Pro’s price, by the way, is $200 a month. We’re paying loss-leader prices for AI; it’s a reality that can’t continue. 

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And these are just the prices that individuals and small businesses pay for AI. To really adopt AI into your enterprise, we’re talking about costs that are orders of magnitude greater. Companies are turning to FinOps for help dealing with this. 

FinOps, a portmanteau of Finance and DevOps, combines financial management and collaborative, agile IT operations into a discipline to manage costs. It started as a way to get a handle on cloud pricing. FinOps’ first job is to optimize cloud spending and align cloud costs with business objectives. Since companies can burn hundreds of millions in bad cloud decisions — according to  Flexera’s 2025 State of Cloud Report, 27% of cloud spending is wasted by being spent on unused, underutilized, or forgotten resources — managing cloud spending is crucial for businesses. As J.R. Storment, the FinOps Foundation’s executive director, said in his keynote, FinOps has grown from a handful of practitioners in 2019 to over 56,000 today who manage over half of global cloud spending.

Today, they’re adding AI spending to their concerns. According to the FinOps Foundation, 63% of FinOps practitioners are already being asked to manage AI costs, a number expected to rise as AI innovation continues to surge. Mismanagement of these costs can not only erode business value but also stifle innovation.

“FinOps teams are being asked to manage accelerating AI spend to allocate its cost, forecast its growth, and ultimately show its value back to the business,” said Storment. “But the speed and complexity of the data make this a moving target, and cost overruns in AI can slow innovation when not well managed.”

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Besides, Storment added, C-level executives are asking that painful question: “You’re using this AI service and spending too much. Do you know what it’s for?” In turn, CEOs are pressured to justify AI spending by demonstrating clear ROI. According to an IBM CEO study, while 65% prioritize AI use cases based on ROI, only about half (52%) report that their generative AI investments deliver value beyond simple cost reduction.

This new certification program is structured as a four-part educational series, with content released in phases to allow immediate upskilling and to keep pace with the rapidly evolving AI landscape. The curriculum is designed for both FinOps and DevOps professionals and covers foundational and advanced topics unique to AI:

The first of these certifications is Introduction to FinOps for AI, which lays down the framework for the relationship between FinOps and AI, and why AI-specific cost management is critical. This will be followed by: 

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• Level 1 (Launching September 2025): Focuses on AI cost allocation, data ingestion, anomaly detection, and chargeback models, highlighting how AI cost dynamics differ from traditional cloud services.
• Level 2 (Launching November 2025): Teaches planning, forecasting, and governance of AI investments, with an emphasis on cost visibility and accountability.
• Level 3 (Launching January 2026): Delves into advanced areas such as workload and rate optimization, unit economics, sustainability, and designing AI systems for cost efficiency.

Upon completing all three levels, participants will be eligible to sit for the “FinOps Certified: FinOps for AI” exam, available from March 2026. Successful candidates will earn a digital certificate and badge, valid for 24 months, which can be shared on platforms like LinkedIn.

Why is it taking so long to roll out the full certification? Because AI is changing so quickly, explained Stacy Case, FinOps Foundation’s VP for professional development, that “instead of waiting for everything to be completed, we’re taking people along with us on this journey.”

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So it is that FinOps for AI, just like AI itself, really, is rushing as fast as possible to get a grip on both what the technology will be good for and how to justify its tremendous costs.  

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