Governing AI Costs and Proving ROI: From Black Box to Board Slide

NRG Energy's Rob Fleischer (Manager, Cloud Operations) and SHI's Kevin Wade team up for a working session on a question that sounds simple until you have to answer it in a real company: we're spending money on AI, but how do we govern that spend and prove it's creating value? Due to investor-relations constraints, they deliberately withhold dollar figures and instead share the operating model itself: two lenses (operations and FinOps/finance) that neither side can answer alone, a diagnostic for why AI cost problems show up (untagged, unattributed, unmeasured, or ungoverned), and a three-workstream path from cost visibility to optimization to a credible ROI framework. Kevin and Rob dig into evidence maturity (experimental, directional, proven), pairing technical activity metrics with real business outcomes, and setting an "honest TCO boundary." The candid throughline: enthusiasm and evidence are not the same thing, and the goal isn't one heroic ROI number but a funding model leadership can actually trust. 00:00 Intro: The Question Every AI Program Faces, "Is It Worth It?" 06:02 Why AI Breaks Your Existing Finance Model 15:00 The NRG Ask and the Two-Layer Operating Model 18:30 Workstream 1: Cost Visibility and Honest TCO Boundaries 21:39 Workstream 2 and 3: Optimization and Proving ROI 26:30 Evidence Maturity, Paired Metrics, and Practical Takeaways 34:31 Audience Q&A Watch the Day 1 Keynote and Tokenomics Foundation announcement: https://www.youtube.com/live/W4g8xvduIbs Watch the Day 2 Keynote: https://www.youtube.com/live/vyQTW0PLw7A Learn more about Token Economics: https://tokeneconomics.com https://x.finops.org https://join.finops.org #FinOps #FinOpsX #AIGovernance #AICostManagement #ROI