Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re building or running AI-powered features in production, you need a clear understanding of inference costs. Get it right, and you can turn your AI investments into profitable growth. As Larry Advey, Director of Cloud Platform and FinOps at CloudZero and a member of the FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council, puts it: “AI investments will only continue to grow.

Earlier this month, we announced the CloudZero Claude Code Plugin and the CloudZero AI Hub — the first step toward putting your cloud cost data directly inside the AI tools your team already uses. The feedback from customers was clear. They said engineers and FinOps teams wanted more tools and more ways to get answers from CloudZero without switching context. Today, we’re delivering more.

For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size, architecture, release cadence, through to how we thought about technical debt. When production is expensive, you optimise for output. You remove friction from shipping.

AI coding agents are getting good at calling tools. Claude Code, Codex, and others can run shell commands, parse JSON, and reason about the results. But they need to know what tools are available and how to use them. That's what skills are for. A skill is a small package of documentation that teaches an AI agent how to use a specific tool. We've built one for Oh Dear.

--- Key Takeaway: Harness AI helped deflect 95% of the platform support tickets for a major financial institution --- These days, success is often measured by what doesn’t happen: When things go right, the software delivery platform is invisible. But what happens when an organization’s delivery velocity increases multifold? Can the platform still stay out of the way?