Yes, it’s another AI blog post. Though, one that may be relevant to you if you’re in the FinOps (or cloud cost management) space. It may even be a bit of a wake-up call to you or your organization, and I hope it becomes a funny artifact to look back on as our entire industry is in transition for what will seem obvious in retrospect.

Intro: FinOps is Stuck in the Manual Era

Let’s be honest, the FinOps space has stalled. In fact, it’s been stagnant for years, with some key exceptions. There are too many vendors (I realize the irony of this statement, but give me a few more paragraphs) entering an already crowded market.

Despite all the dashboards, alerts, and fancy visualizations out there, teams are still drowning in manual workflows. Engineers still spend days reconciling cost data with cloud providers, and finance teams are left chasing down the same inefficiencies quarter after quarter. That’s not “operational excellence.” That’s dashboard fatigue.

CEOs of competitive companies are even making product posts about their "powerful engine", and in the next sentence it's a "point-and-click interface."

The truth is: FinOps as we know it has become passive. It's time for something new. Practitioners deserve better tools, better workflows, and ones that are built for the modern era.

Enter the Agentic Era

The next generation of FinOps isn’t about showing you the problem; it’s about fixing it. Agentic FinOps means leveraging intelligent, autonomous agents that not only detect cost anomalies but remediate them, automatically and safely, with optional human-in-the-loop approvals.

We’re talking about systems that understand your architecture, policies, and budgets and can take direct, API-driven action.

Instead of looking at another dashboard that says, “Your spend is up 12%,” agentic systems will:

• Scale down or remove idle resources in real time.
• Reallocate resources intelligently based on utilization trends.
• Open Pull Requests for you to remove unused Datadog metrics.
• Negotiate commitments dynamically across cloud providers on your behalf.

In fact, this is already possible. The reason it isn’t being talked about? Because the vast number of vendors in the space aren’t product companies, they’re sales-driven organizations that have sold antiquated software that may never have the ability to support AI workloads, and they’re trying to hang on to a business that may soon fade.

The Problem: Most Vendors Are Stuck in the Past

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most FinOps vendors are antiquated reporting tools. In certain cases, the brain drain resulting from the M&A of their platforms has already impacted the organization, and they don’t possess the people to build what’s required for this market shift. Or, if they’re a startup, most of the space is riddled with salespeople pushing platforms that aren’t built for modern engineering teams.

These platforms promise AI but can’t even expose a usable API. They talk about automation, but the only thing automated is the email report they send every Monday morning.

If your FinOps platform doesn’t:

• Offer deep API access that isn’t overtly rate-limited,
• Support Model Context Protocol (MCP), and
• Offer a Terraform Provider for platform orchestration, and
• Integrate with agent frameworks (like OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s new agentic ecosystems),

Then it’s not ready for the future; it’s holding you and your organization back.

On the first point of this list, here’s the company the CEO mentioned further up in the blog post’s documentation on rate-limiting to a whopping 60 requests per day. Can you imagine your FinOps platform being AI-ready when it can’t even make more than 3 API requests an hour?

From Insight to Action

FinOps was born from the idea that cost visibility drives accountability. That’s still true, but visibility alone is no longer enough. The cloud is too dynamic, and cost waste too fast-moving, for humans to play catch-up every cycle.

Agentic FinOps closes that loop, replacing dashboards with decision-making. When models can reason over spend data, execute remediations, and learn from the outcomes, FinOps stops being reactive and becomes self-optimizing.

A Call to the Industry

When I speak with candidates interviewing at Vantage, I often get asked what motivates me. My answer is usually along the lines of 1) I love the problem set and 2) there is a lot of really bad software that other companies are selling in the space that doesn’t get the job done, and I think people should expect more.

It’s time to demand more from FinOps tools.

If a vendor can’t show you the following, then they’re not building for the next decade of cloud operations:

• A real API surface for programmatic control,
• Compatibility with emerging MCP/agent ecosystems, or
• Authentic roadmap for autonomous remediation

Buyers are no longer looking for the prettiest charts, they’ll be the ones with the smartest agents.

Conclusion: FinOps Without Agents is Already Obsolete

Cloud economics moves too fast for static tooling. The companies that embrace agentic FinOps now will build systems that don’t just report waste, they eliminate it.

The question isn’t whether the future of FinOps is agentic. It’s whether your vendor is. If you’re curious what your vendor thinks of this topic, you should send them this blog post and see how they react. Or, if you’re a Vantage customer, you can simply get started with the Vantage FinOps agent.

Lastly, it’s not lost on me that I’m CEO and Co-Founder of Vantage, and the blog post is naturally biased. Though I think, it's hard to refute the points for where the market is going. As an open invitation, I’m happy to discuss this topic live with product leaders or CEOs of any other legitimate player in the FinOps space in the event we want even playing grounds.