Balancing the AI boom: The FinOps tightrope in India’s genAI era

November 20, 2025

Balancing the AI boom: The FinOps tightrope in India’s genAI era

As India races to tap into the GenAI wave, companies are facing a new financial challenge: how to control runaway cloud costs. In his piece in ET CIO “Balancing the AI boom: The FinOps tightrope in India’s GenAI era,” CEO and Founder of CloudThat, Bhavesh Goswami, argues that while AI offers unprecedented growth opportunities ranging from automated content to intelligent decision-making, its cost structure has undergone a rather volatile transformation.

From Servers to Tokens

Rather than predictable hourly compute bills, firms now pay “per token,” per inference, or per dataset. That makes budgeting tricky, especially when heavy model usage can unexpectedly spike cloud spend.

Because of this shift, Bhavesh foresees how FinOps needs to evolve from a back-office tracking tool to a strategic function. Companies that embed cost controls, such as token capping, real-time dashboards, and ROI tracking, are seeing significant savings. Statistics have proven that AI-driven FinOps frameworks reduce cloud wastage by as much as 40%.

Balancing AI Costs on the Domestic Front

Traditional AI tools, such as GitHub Copilot, have predictable costs, but custom large language models and inference-heavy workloads can incur unexpected expenses. Smart FinOps teams are utilising anomaly alerts and predictive spend models to identify surges before they interfere with budgets.

On the national front, India’s AI ambitions are serious. The government’s India AI Mission has earmarked over ₹10,300 crore and plans a GPU infrastructure of 38,000 units. Even so, many enterprises admit they lack the governance frameworks and tagging systems to turn AI investments into measurable business value and CloudThat wants to bridge this gap.

The Future of FinOps Integration

The core argument? For GenAI’s economic promise to become a reality, a spending discipline needs to be established. Instead of being treated as an afterthought, it has to be addressed as a priority that will lead to a coherent relationship between financial intelligence and AI strategy.

As Bhavesh sees it, FinOps shouldn’t just be about cutting costs but also about aligning AI spend with business outcomes.

Want to go deeper? Read the full ET CIO article here