Why it matters
The FinOps Foundation's 2026 survey — 1,190-plus practitioners responsible for roughly $83 billion of annual cloud spend — found 73% of organisations overshot their AI cost projections. Just 43% have a formal AI governance policy at all.
Tokenmaxxing read
Routing is the cheapest fix on the table: tiered architectures report a median blended $2.31 per million tokens against $18.40 for default-to-frontier shops, and one enterprise cut a $40,000 monthly bill to $24,000 without changing the product.
Source takeaway
The hard data here is the rework. New Relic's survey of 200 US technology decision-makers found 78% saw production incidents spike and 82% hit a major failure tied to AI code within six months. Treat the unattributed spend anecdotes with more caution.
