Hey,

My wife and I had our second child earlier this month, and in between changing diapers and irregular sleeping patterns, I'm often scrolling LinkedIn. Occasionally I come across something that is "screenshot worthy" but most of the time it feels like "content for content's sake" with the predictable AI-generated hook to get you to click "More...". Since I cannot attend FinOpsX and some of the other events this summer, I'm leaning on you for the "hallway intel" that this newsletter is built on. I'm betting that the hot topic will be AI token economics and how to apply FinOps principles to AI consumption. We are doing that research and learning about what companies are doing and how AI-native infrastructure companies are thinking through this problem, and I'll share back what I learn. If there are other topics that you want this newsletter to dig into, reply and tell me.

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TBM stuff I'm thinking about...

A few years ago I sat down to do a rapid TBM cost exercise for a company spending $3M on IT. Small budget, so I put on the Hamilton Soundtrack and had the core cost mapping done in a few hours. I remember that it was nice to have the flexibility of Excel again after doing this work in industrialized tools for so long. We skipped App TCO and made some reasonable assumptions to get cost associated with their products and services. The private equity firm that acquired them wanted to understand how much of the IT budget supported the "widgets" their customers bought. I think back to that engagement often nowadays because these AI tools are allowing us to rapidly prototype in ways that weren't possible before. Collecting data, analyzing it, and putting it to work takes days, not weeks. With our services, we're taking this "rapid prototype" approach with our Traction Sprint offering, a 4-week engagement to tackle a specific TBM/FinOps use case. But I wonder if ITFM teams can take similar approaches to their own use cases.

Even if you have a tool in place, could you use your enterprise AI capabilities to mock something up quickly, proof it out, and then merge it into your TBM tool once validated?

A few weeks back, I shared 5 ways TBM Teams should be using AI. I'd love to hear about cool AI experiments you've been running inside your TBM/FinOps program. Reply and tell me. I'll anonymize the good ones and share back. Or give you (or your company) a shoutout if you say it's okay.

Gboyega Adebayo
Founder & Managing Director, Falconbridge
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