The AI surge has put a 15% dent in Cloud Efficiency Rates, even as FinOps maturity has accelerated

BOSTON, Feb. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CloudZero, the global leader in proactive cloud efficiency, today released FinOps In The AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, a report on cloud and AI spending produced in partnership with B2B SaaS research firm Benchmarkit. The report finds that while the incidence of formal cloud cost management programs has nearly doubled year over year (from 39% to 72% of respondents), mean Cloud Efficiency Rate (CER) has fallen by 15% (from 80% to 65%) across all segments.

CER measures how much of a company’s revenue they send to their cloud providers. Last year, top-quartile CER sat at 92% — those companies’ cloud costs represented just 8% of their overall revenue. This year, the top quartile CER dropped to 85%, and the 25th percentile CER fell from 70% to 45%. The culprit: AI spending, which now exceeds $10M at 40% of surveyed companies.

“AI spend is surging, and most companies don’t have the visibility to know whether it’s driving returns. The math is simple: Whether or not your AI bets pay off, you’ll eventually need to turn that investment into profitable growth. Companies that put cost intelligence and profitability guardrails in place now will be far better positioned than those scrambling to do it later,” said Erik Peterson, founder and CTO at CloudZero.

The report also explains the inherent difficulties of AI cost reporting. Most companies use some combination of public cloud, private cloud, third-party GPU providers, and hosted LLM APIs. These providers have different billing frameworks, send bills at different intervals, and use different data formats, making it nearly impossible for companies to get a comprehensive overview of what they’re spending — much less what exactly they’re spending it on. Just 43% of companies track these and other costs by customer, and less than a quarter (22%) track by transaction, making accurate pricing for AI offerings largely guesswork.

“AI is throwing a wrench in companies’ FinOps operations,” said Larry Advey, director of cloud platform and FinOps at CloudZero, and a FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council member. “The most successful companies have always been the ones that understand there’s no tradeoff between making money and saving money; that FinOps comes down to making savvy IT investments. Even though AI billing is a bit chaotic at the moment, companies can and should put basic systems in place to measure the effectiveness of their AI investments. AI investments will only continue to grow. As they do, the companies with the firmest grasp of their profitability will be the ones who win.”

Read the full report here.

About CloudZero

CloudZero is the leader in proactive cloud cost efficiency. We enable engineers to build cost-efficient software without slowing down innovation. CloudZero’s next-generation cost intelligence platform automates the collection, allocation, and analysis of cloud and AI costs to uncover savings opportunities and improve unit economics. We are the only platform that enables companies to understand 100% of their operational cloud spend and take an engineering-led approach to optimizing that spend. CloudZero is used by industry leaders worldwide, such as Coinbase, Klaviyo, Miro, Nubank, and Rapid7. Visit cloudzero.com to get started today.