Managing AI Costs in the Age of Tokenomics

In this episode of FinOps Fridays, Hunter Willis sits down with Maddy Yeazel, VP of FinOps and Tokenomics Solutions at IBM Cloudability, to unpack what a decade of FinOps experience says about the AI transition. Drawing on daily conversations with customers, Maddy explains why the token is the new unit of consumption, why AI costs behave differently from anything FinOps teams have managed before, and where AI cost management is heading next.

Listen to this episode for insight into:

• Why AI forecasting breaks traditional models. Costs are non-deterministic, with the same prompt consuming different tokens across runs and models.
• Why attribution now goes deeper than teams and apps, down to individual users and AI agents, and why agents change the game with what amounts to a blank check.
• Why the fundamentals matter more than ever: Inform, Optimize, and Operate, allocation, and how cloud optimization savings can help unlock your AI budget.