The Chain of Intent: Top–Down FinOps in an AI–Driven Cloud

AI is transforming cloud infrastructure at a speed that makes manual cost oversight impossible — spending can spiral before anyone intervenes, and engineers are too valuable to be distracted by financial firefighting. In this session, Frank Contrepois introduces the “Chain of Intent,” a top-down FinOps governance framework that translates executive strategy into automated cloud policies, cascading from high-level mandates down to real-time enforcement rules for GPUs, foundation models, and training workloads. The goal: give AI engineers the safety guardrails they need to experiment freely, while ensuring every automated decision traces back to a clear business intent.