As spending on AI reaches $2.6 trillion, CloudZero provides a shared system for finance, IT, and engineering to connect all the business outcomes that AI drives.
boston, May 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CloudZero, an AI ROI company, today launched its AI Financial Control Plane. It’s a shared system used by finance, IT, and engineering teams to connect every AI dollar spent to business outcomes in real time. With this announcement, CloudZero extends beyond cloud cost management to the defining challenge of the AI era: understanding not just what resources an AI investment consumes, but what outcomes it actually produces.
According to Gartner, spending on enterprise AI is expected to reach $2.6 trillion in 2026 and grow at 47% annually. However, only 14% of CFOs report a clear and measurable ROI from their AI investments, and 80% of companies are under-expecting their AI spending by 25% or more.
The first phase of enterprise AI was token maxing. The task was to promote implementation, measure usage, and monitor usage. token The count will go up. The next phase is ROI. As AI spending moves from experimentation to production workflows, the question changes from “What did we spend it on?” “Who did this spending benefit, and how much did it benefit?”
For nearly a decade, CloudZero has been helping businesses solve one of the cloud’s toughest problems: tracking the cost of shared infrastructure from customers to products to features to the teams that drive them. AI creates the same attribution problems faster, with greater volatility, and with greater business urgency.
Unlike the cloud, AI spend is generated continuously through model calls, agents, built-in functionality, and automated workflows. Provider invoices arrive too late and lack the business context leaders need. CloudZero captures that activity in real-time and turns it into actionable AI ROI intelligence.
The AI financial control plane is built on four core capabilities:
- Attribution of AI results It connects AI spend to the outcomes AI produces, giving finance, operations, and engineering a defensible view of the cost of AI, what it delivers, and where it creates value.
- Multidimensional assignment Analyzing AI spending across key dimensions, showing what AI costs, who drives it, and what it produces.
- real time spending It starts with telemetry, not a monthly fee. CloudZero captures AI usage on a call-by-call basis as work occurs, preserving business context that invoices cannot provide.
- Redesigned user experience Help your team explore AI spending, model key aspects, and quickly move from cost questions to cost decisions. Support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) extends that intelligence to the AI-native tools that engineering teams are already using.
Becky Canterbury, senior manager of business operations and cloud FinOps at Shutterstock. “Every executive team is under pressure to move quickly to AI while proving the financial impact behind each investment. The challenge is no longer whether to adopt AI or not; it’s about understanding how much AI costs, where that spend goes, and how it links to business outcomes. CloudZero provides a single view across models, providers, commitments, capabilities, and customer behaviors, making it easy to move AI from spreadsheet-based reporting to and help you move to a clearer, more strategic view of your cloud costs.”
Scott Castle, Chief Product Officer, CloudZero: “AI is becoming central to how companies build products, serve customers, and run their businesses. However, most companies still manage AI by: token Costs rise faster than expected, and counts and monthly bills increase even though the ROI remains uncertain. As companies move from driving AI adoption to justifying AI spending, boards and CFOs are starting to ask important questions. So what did we spend, what did it produce, and what was its value? CloudZero’s financial control plane answers that. ”
To view a demo of the Financial Control Plane, please contact us here: https://www.cloudzero.com/demo/
About Cloud Zero
CloudZero is an AI ROI company, providing a financial control plane focused on how AI actually generates costs. Multidimensional allocation captures every AI interaction the moment it happens and associates it with the customer, product, or feature that drove it, giving finance, operations, and engineering leaders a shared view of cost per customer, cost per product, and cost per feature in real time. AI Hub embeds its intelligence directly into the agent workflows that engineering teams already use. Trusted by leaders such as coinbaseKlaviyo, Miro, Nubank, Rapid7, and CloudZero are how modern enterprises are turning AI spending into business intelligence.
Source CloudZero
