Office hours: an AI agent caught a missed discount

A packed session, with a genuinely striking story about AI agents catching FinOps mistakes humans hadn’t, plus two real roadmap announcements.

An AI agent caught a missed discount

One attendee shared a live customer story: the customer had the FinOps toolkit data in Kusto and the Azure SRE agent installed with the FinOps toolkit skill and a Kusto connector. The attendee used the SRE agent to query the customer’s own cost data and surfaced a real billing discrepancy that had been going unnoticed, then had the agent post the finding straight into a Teams adaptive card for the FinOps VP to see. Nobody had to notice the gap manually. As the attendee put it, once an agent is wired into your cost data and your ticketing, it can go find the problems you didn’t know to look for.

The FinOps toolkit is shipping SRE agent integration in version 15, after roughly six weeks of beta testing at the time of this call.

A new FinOps hubs customer portal

Michael Flanakin and Roland Krummenacher are building a portal for FinOps hubs customers, close to early access invites but not public yet. The initial focus is operational, ongoing cost management rather than deployment, since most of the pain reported by the hundreds of existing hubs customers shows up after deployment, not during it.

Why this matters beyond the toolkit

The same attendee also connected a broader dot: nearly every leadership slide at their most recent internal roadshow mentioned FinOps, and with Agent 365, Azure API Management, and Azure AI Foundry all shipping their own usage data with no unifying cost story yet, the toolkit needs to add all three as data sources. That’s a preview of where “tokenomics” is headed across the Microsoft FinOps ecosystem, not just inside one open-source project.

The next FinOps hubs portal update, or the next AI-agent-catches-a-mistake story, might come from the next office hours. It’s every other Wednesday, and anyone can drop in.