Robbie Plourde, USU | FinOps X 2026

In this interview from FinOps X 2026, Robbie Plourde, executive director of sales and business development at USU Solutions, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss the evolution of FinOps from cloud cost control into an enterprise discipline for AI value management and token economics. Drawing on a traditional IT asset management background, Plourde explains how token-based pricing obscures costs in ways that compute and storage never did — a single opaque line item that engineers consume without tracking the downstream financial impact. He underscores that AI is only as reliable as its foundational data, warning that poor cost data produces confidently wrong answers at scale. As organizations juggle six to fifteen tools to monitor spend and usage, the practitioner's role, Plourde argues, is shifting from collecting data to interpreting it and translating it into measurable business value. The conversation also explores the build-versus-buy tension in AI-embedded FinOps tooling. Plourde details how USU trained its platform on millions of invoices — a process that exposed just how demanding model training is in practice — and argues that vendor-embedded AI offers cross-customer data richness that internal builds cannot easily replicate, even as it sacrifices transparency into how the model operates. The panel breaks down why true cross-department collaboration between finance and IT remains more aspiration than reality, drawing a parallel to the "shift left" movement in cloud security and expressing cautious optimism that rising C-suite pressure around AI costs could finally force genuine organizational alignment. The discussion closes on global governance, with Nashawaty highlighting the EU Cyber Resilience Act's compliance deadlines and the extraterritorial reach of European data sovereignty rules as a forcing function for enterprises worldwide to establish guardrails before AI spending spirals out of control. Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/ Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/ Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/ 00:00 - Intro 00:06 - Evolving Cloud Management: From FinOps to AI and Migration Trends 02:08 - Streamlining Through AI and Unified Data Solutions 06:11 - Challenges with Tokenomics 08:46 - Integrating AI and Cross-Department Collaboration in FinOps 11:40 - The Future of Global FinOps Governance and Community #theCUBE #FinOpsX #theCUBEresearch #USUSolutions #AI #FinOpsForAI