The FinOps Foundation has released its sixth annual State of FinOps survey, and IT service management (ITSM) is explicitly named as one of the key disciplines with which FinOps teams are now collaborating. If you work in ITSM and you haven’t been paying attention to FinOps, now’s the time to start.
FinOps Explained
FinOps, short for Financial Operations, is the practice of managing the cost and value of technology spend.
It started as a cloud cost management discipline, but the FinOps Foundation has just updated its mission from “Advancing the People who manage the Value of Cloud” to “Advancing the People who manage the Value of Technology.” That single word change, from Cloud to Technology, tells you everything about where FinOps is heading. It’s heading straight toward territory that ITSM already occupies.
The Key Numbers
The survey drew responses from a broad global mix of small to medium businesses (SMBs), enterprises, and large enterprises. Here’s a handful of key stats:
- 98% of respondents now manage artificial intelligence (AI) spend, up from 31% just two years ago
- 90% now manage SaaS spend or plan to within the year, up 25%
- 64% manage licensing
- 57% manage private cloud
- 48% manage data center costs
- An emerging 28% are starting to include labor costs.
What was once a cloud-focused practice has become, as the Foundation calls it, a “multi-technology discipline for value.”
One survey respondent described the progression: “First, they asked us to fix cloud. Then fix the software mess. Now it’s fix the contract and license mess, now fix the data center.”
If you’ve been in ITSM for any length of time, you’ll recognize this pattern. We went through the same expansion, from help desk to IT service desk and eventually to enterprise service management (ESM).
Everyone’s Managing AI Spend, Nobody Can Prove it’s Working
FinOps for AI is the top forward-looking priority in the survey. AI cost management is the number one skillset that teams say they need. And it’s not limited to large enterprises; organizations of all sizes are grappling with it.
What’s particularly concerning is the funding model. The report reveals that many organizations are being asked to self-fund AI investments through optimization savings. In other words, squeeze more from your existing technology footprint to create space for AI spend. The trouble is that traditional waste opportunities are drying up at the same time. As one survey respondent noted: “We have hit the ‘big rocks’ of waste and now face a high volume of smaller opportunities that require more effort to capture.”
But here’s the quote from the report that really needs attention: “Is your AI providing value? No one can answer that question yet.”
This lines up directly with what we’re seeing in ITSM. In our 2026 ITSM trends poll, AI governance came in as the second biggest area where the community wants help, at 37%.
Organizations are rushing to deploy AI without the governance foundations to support it, perhaps without visibility into its costs, and without the ability to articulate the value it delivers. We’ve already flagged this as a significant ITSM risk for 2026, and FinOps teams are hitting the same wall from the financial side. If ITSM and FinOps aren’t collaborating on AI governance right now, they need to be.
FinOps Wants to Work with ITSM
The report identifies several “intersecting disciplines” that FinOps teams are actively working with. IT Financial Management (ITFM) is the most frequent collaboration partner, followed by IT asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) for asset compliance and governance, then ITSM for policies, processes, and procedures, with ESG and Platform Engineering also in the mix.
The ITSM collaboration is specifically shifting toward automation and remediation. This makes sense. FinOps teams identify changes that need to happen, such as decommissioning underused resources, right-sizing infrastructure, or enforcing tagging policies. But implementing those changes? That’s operational process work, and that’s what service management does. FinOps needs ITSM to make its recommendations stick.
Larger companies tend to maintain separate FinOps and ITSM teams that collaborate, while smaller companies integrate them. The convergence between FinOps, ITAM, ITFM, and ITSM is accelerating, and ITSM professionals who engage proactively will be in a much stronger position than those who wait to be asked.
From Cost Reduction to Value
One of the most interesting shifts in the report is the move away from pure optimization. Waste reduction is still a priority, but when you combine all the other priorities (scope expansion, governance and policy, organizational alignment, and forecasting), they collectively outweigh optimization alone.
As one advanced practitioner told the survey: “The days of finding something that’s grossly misconfigured, and we’re gonna save a bunch of money… that was years ago. I haven’t been focused on optimization as priority one for a long time.”
Mature FinOps practices are now focused on unit economics, AI value quantification, and influencing technology selection before commitments are made. The shift is from “How do we spend less?” to “How do we spend better?”
ITSM is on the same journey. We need to move beyond measuring what we do (SLAs) to measuring the value and experience we deliver (XLAs). FinOps is making the same leap, just from a financial rather than an experiential starting point. Both disciplines are converging on the same point: managing technology well means understanding and communicating its value, not just tracking its costs or activities.
FinOps Has Executive Attention. Does ITSM?
78% of FinOps teams now report to the CTO or CIO, up 18% from 2023. Teams reporting to the CFO have dropped to just 8%.
The executive engagement numbers tell an interesting story. Practitioners with VP, SVP, or C-suite engagement show 2-4 times more influence over technology selection decisions than those only engaging at the Director level. Cloud service selection jumps from 12% influence to 53%. Cloud provider selection goes from 8% to 47%.
FinOps earned that influence by demonstrating business value and embedding itself in decision-making. In my opinion, too many ITSM teams are still stuck in operational delivery, visible to the business only when something breaks. It’s worth asking honestly: Has ITSM made the same effort to earn its seat at the table?
Shift Left and the Measurement Challenge
The FinOps community is increasingly focused on “shift left”: embedding financial requirements earlier in the engineering and product lifecycle. Pre-deployment architecture costing has emerged as a top desired tool capability. Instead of identifying waste after the fact, FinOps teams want to prevent it before it happens.
ITSM has been talking about shift left for years: moving resolution and knowledge closer to the point of need. The principles are the same, even if the application is different. Both disciplines recognize that catching issues early is cheaper and more effective than fixing them later.
And both face the same fundamental measurement challenge. As one survey respondent put it: “Once you fix it, it’s gone. How do we give developers credit for shift-left activities?”
Any ITSM professional who has tried to measure the value of proactive problem management will recognize this question instantly. The FinOps community is proposing some interesting solutions, including unit cost tracking at the team level, including FinOps activities in performance reviews, and creating separate recognition budgets. These are approaches ITSM could learn from and adapt.
What ITSM Should Do
The State of FinOps 2026 describes a discipline that, in six years, has evolved from a niche function into a strategic practice with executive visibility and cross-organizational reach. There are a few things ITSM professionals should take from this.
The convergence between FinOps, ITAM, ITFM, and ITSM is happening and accelerating. If your ITSM practice still operates in isolation from these disciplines, that needs to change.
AI governance is a shared challenge: our own community polling and the FinOps survey both show it’s a top priority, and building separate governance frameworks in separate silos is a recipe for duplication and confusion.
Value language is what gets you executive attention, and FinOps has proved that a practice can shift from reactive reporting to strategic influence within a few years, but only by learning to talk about business outcomes rather than operational metrics.
And lean central teams that scale through enablement and embedded champions, rather than headcount, are getting results in FinOps. The same model is working in forward-thinking ITSM teams, too.
ITSM has deep expertise in process design, governance, change enablement, and organizational change management. FinOps needs all of it. The question is whether ITSM professionals engage as partners or watch from the sidelines while another discipline works on challenges we should have been leading on.
I know which option I’d choose.
Sophie Danby
Sophie is a freelance ITSM marketing consultant, helping ITSM solution vendors to develop and implement effective marketing strategies.
She covers both traditional areas of marketing (such as advertising, trade shows, and events) and digital marketing (such as video, social media, and email marketing). She is also a trained editor.
