Agentic FinOps and the AI Cost Explosion ft. Pathik Sharma | Ep #76
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 they got into:
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.
"Embrace the change that is happening and learn it. FinOps holds keys to the kingdom" - Pathik Sharma
Connect with Pathik:
Website: https://pathiksharma.com/
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor Houck sits down with Pathik Sharma, cloud cost optimization lead at Google Cloud and co-founder of Google's Cloud FinOps practice, to make the case that agentic FinOps is the next evolution of the discipline. Pathik breaks down why the real opportunity isn't replacing FinOps teams with AI but using an army of agents to close the gap between knowing and doing, how customers are drawing the line between safe autonomous actions like cost allocation and labeling versus high-risk moves like Kubernetes rightsizing that still need a human in the loop, and why managing the explosion in AI spend means looking far beyond token costs to the full stack of infrastructure, storage, and change management behind it.