The State of FinOps 2026: The end of cloud-only FinOps

Today, the FinOps Foundation released the results of the State of FinOps 2026 survey. This annual report offers valuable insights into FinOps practitioners’ key priorities and industry trends.

The State of FinOps 2026 report makes one thing clear. FinOps is no longer focused on cloud optimization. If you’re a practitioner, you already know this to be true; your mandate has already expanded to multi-cloud, AI, and more. The data isn’t subtle.

Keep reading for my key takeaways. 

AI broke the old model

According to the data, 98% of organizations now manage some form of AI spend. Two years ago it was 31%. “AI Cost Management” is now the #1 skillset FinOps teams are trying to add (58%).

Translation: AI is exploding, governance maturity is lagging. Executives are demanding that AI be self-funded through optimization. This is not a tagging problem; it’s a capital allocation problem.

When AI budgets rise across public cloud, SaaS, private cloud, and data center, cost visibility must cross those same boundaries.

The scope expansion is over. It already happened.

FinOps Scopes were introduced in 2024 as “a segment of technology-related spending to which FinOps practitioners apply FinOps concepts.” Based on the State of FinOps 2026 report, we’re now seeing that:

That is not experimentation. That is operational reality. If 90% of teams manage SaaS, we’re no longer in the cloud financial management era. Technology spend management is here to stay. While the discipline has shifted, most FinOps tools haven’t.

FinOps has shifted up and that changes everything

The State of FinOps 2026 report highlights that 78% of FinOps now report into the CTO/CIO. When executives engage with FinOps data, influence over technology selection jumps dramatically. This is the quiet revolution. FinOps isn’t explaining last month’s bill anymore.

It’s influencing:

The 2026 iteration of FinOps Framework formalizes this with a new capability: Executive Strategy Alignment.

Optimization is flattening

The report admits something important: Teams have already captured the “big rocks” of waste. What’s left is harder. Smaller. Slower. When optimization ROI flattens, value shifts from:

“How much did we save?” to “What are we funding and should we?”

That requires portfolio visibility across all technology categories. Not separate dashboards, stitched-together exports, or using five tools with five taxonomies.

One system of record.

Tooling is breaking at the enterprise edge

Mature enterprises are frustrated with commercial platforms. They’re building internal systems, migrating to BI stacks, and/or juggling multiple tools for different personas.

Why? Because most tools were built for cloud optimization workflows. They were not built for:

The State of FinOps 2026 doesn’t suggest gradual evolution. It documents a structural shift. The discipline has already moved upstream and the scope has already expanded. The executive expectations have already changed and the only open question is this:

“Will FinOps tooling evolve to match the mandate or will enterprises keep building their own ledgers internally because vendors stay focused on cloud?”

2026 is the inflection point

FinOps has evolved from reactive cloud cost management to proactive technology value management. It is becoming the operating model for how enterprises govern technology investment.

You cannot govern technology investment if cloud lives in one system, SaaS in another, licensing in spreadsheets, data center in finance tools, and AI in experimental dashboards. Fragmentation kills executive decision quality.

The implication: If FinOps now spans all of these scopes then it needs what Finance has always had: a unified ledger. Ternary is the Universal Spend Ledger^TM for modern technology delivering a normalized, trusted, system of record. 

Without it:

With it:

The next generation of FinOps isn’t about better dashboards. It’s about unified technology intelligence. That’s the direction and it’s not optional.