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IT STRATEGY

Morning Brew Design

Traditional FinOps, which brings together an organization’s finance and tech teams to help manage cloud and tech spending, may now be a thing of the past.

That’s according to Pooja Kumar, Prudential Financial VP of cloud strategy and transformation, who took the stage during FinOps X 2026 to discuss the impact of AI on the longtime framework.

“Traditional FinOps is dead,” Kumar said during a keynote. “Not FinOps the discipline, not FinOps the community, but FinOps the way we’ve been doing it for the last many, many years. And if I can be brutally honest, that was dying even way before AI came into existence.”

The times are a-changing. FinOps is transforming rapidly, evolving beyond just cloud spend as practitioners focus on controlling their AI expenditures. According to the FinOps Foundation’s annual State of FinOps report, 98% of practitioners now manage AI spend.

Learn the new FinOps playbook.—BM

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IT STRATEGY

Chief grief

Illustration: Morning Brew Design, Photo: Adobe Stock

Daniel Herrington is still getting the hang of being a chief AI officer.

He’s in his fifth month as CAIO at The Zebra, a marketplace for home and auto insurance. “I think my role is to put hands on the keyboard, and build, and inspire the rest of the team to engage with new technologies and understand them,” he said.

That involves experimenting with what AI can do. Most recently, Herrington tested a chatbot’s ability to surface a policy option—by analyzing an LLM’s responses against thousands of synthetic conversations.

But there’s a pressure on CAIOs to prove that their AI is transformative and moving (quickly) beyond just a successful pilot.

One consultant sees the role as a potential trap.—BH

WORD OF THE WEEK

FinOps: This practice tasks organizations with making the most efficient financial decisions on cloud spending. For example, companies optimizing their cloud spend might track it on a granular level, optimize the use of free trials, audit cloud licensing on a regular basis, and make a point of aggressively negotiating rates with vendors. Learn more.

IT OPERATIONS

Dot-branding

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There’s a small window of time for your company to go from .com to .whateveryouwantreally.

Companies can now apply for a generic top-level domain, or gTLD: an internet extension that replaces the usual .com with a unique identifier. With a .brand domain, for example, organizations can use their familiar trademark at the end of the URL.

Think of it like .nike, or .brew, or even cloud.microsoft, which the company announced in 2023 as a “unified domain for Microsoft 365 apps and services.”

But are these options dotWorth it?

IT pros consider the security case.—BH

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