Skip to main content

COMPEL Glossary / finops-for-ai

FinOps for AI

The FinOps Foundation's Inform-Optimize-Operate lifecycle applied to AI workloads — visibility into AI spend, optimisation of token and compute costs, and operational discipline.

What this means in practice

Distinguished from general FinOps by the token-economics dimension and by the need to tie cost to value (not just budget).

Synonyms

AI FinOps practice , FinOps Foundation FinOps for AI

See also

  • Unit economics — Cost and revenue per atomic unit — per transaction, per successful decision, per hour saved — for an AI feature.
  • Compute budget (VDT) — A pre-agreed ceiling on training or inference compute per AI feature per period — expressed in tokens, FLOPs, or dollars.
  • Total cost of ownership (TCO, AI) — Build + run + refresh + govern + retire cost across an AI feature's full life.

Related articles in the Body of Knowledge