Everything you need to know about managing AI spend in 2026
AI spend is spiky and unpredictable, so forecasting costs up front and waiting for the next budget cycle no longer works. In this webinar hosted by Sam Barlien, Head of Ecosystem at Platform Engineering Community, Grace Gui, Senior Product Marketing Manager at ProsperOps, Josh Glover, FinOps SME at ProsperOps, and David Tepper, CEO and Co-founder at Ascerta (formerly Pay-i), share the Shift Right for AI framework for funding AI with cloud savings, measuring real ROI and reinvesting for growth. Explore the full ProsperOps platform engineering survey report, the effective savings rate benchmarks Josh mentions, and Ascerta's AI management platform: https://www.prosperops.com/blog/, https://ascerta.com 0:00 Welcome and intros 2:16 Meet the speakers 4:39 What this webinar covers 5:48 Survey: platform teams' top cost priorities 7:27 Who drives cost strategy? 8:46 How teams measure IDP impact 10:34 Why measuring AI impact is so hard 11:18 Introducing Shift Right for AI 13:04 The three phases of the framework 13:54 Phase one: optimize to create budget 15:45 Rate optimization strategies 17:51 Example: covering cyclical workloads 19:13 Commitments during migrations and rightsizing 21:01 Effective savings rate explained 24:03 Unified autonomous optimization 25:35 Phases two and three: improving AI ROI 26:40 The true cost of every AI use case 27:19 Structured vs. unstructured AI use 28:36 Coding agents and the AI SDLC 29:30 Why usage metrics don't show value 30:48 Building a behavior map 31:53 Fixing low-value AI behavior 33:41 Demo: tracking coding agent behavior 35:39 Measuring agents against business KPIs 37:03 Agents that use multiple models 37:44 Adoption isn't productivity 39:22 Q&A: which metrics measure AI success? 40:18 Q&A: does tracking add agent latency? 40:37 Q&A: ROI with open-weight and frontier models 42:15 Q&A: what's a good ESR benchmark? 44:14 Wrap-up Ready to fund your next AI initiative? 🚀 Get your copy of the book, Thinking in Platforms, and learn how to build platforms that make cost and value visible to everyone: https://weaveintelligence.io/thinking-in-platforms-book Join the conversation in our Community Slack channel and swap FinOps and AI cost tips with thousands of platform engineers: https://platformengineering.org/slack-rd Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest data, events and insights! https://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-org And keep the momentum going! Continue your platform engineering journey with Platform Engineering University: https://university.platformengineering.org #FinOps #PlatformEngineering #AICostOptimization