FinOps Lessons for the AI Era | From a Startup Founder's Desk скачать в хорошем качестве

FinOps Lessons for the AI Era | From a Startup Founder's Desk

Puneet Gupta, Founder & CEO of Amberflo, joins Mala Ramakrishnan to unpack one of the biggest blind spots in AI adoption: cost, governance, and tying LLM usage to real business value. A former General Manager at Amazon Web Services and founding member of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Puneet brings deep cloud infrastructure experience to the AI era. In this conversation, he explains why token usage is exploding, why experiments don’t translate cleanly into production, and why enterprises must “get ahead of the bill” with AI governance. The episode dives into AI gateways, attribution models, multi-cloud realities, usage-based pricing, and the leadership discipline required to scale startups without chasing false momentum. If you're a founder, CIO, or operator deploying AI at scale, this episode is a practical guide to managing cost, governance, and long-term strategy. ________________________________________________________________ Timestamps 00:00 Intro and Puneet’s background 01:00 Early days at AWS and cloud lessons 02:00 The origin story of Amberflo 03:00 Inside AWS metering and billing systems 04:30 Usage-based business models in the cloud era 06:00 From billing to AI governance and FinOps 07:30 Moving from AI experiments to production 09:00 Why LLM token usage explodes with agents 10:30 Tying AI spend to business outcomes 11:45 Why parsing vendor bills isn’t enough 12:30 The rise of AI gateways 14:00 CIO use cases: cost control and developer tooling 15:30 Product-facing AI attribution challenges 16:30 Context windows and unpredictable token costs 17:30 Founder advice: don’t confuse momentum with progress 19:00 Choosing the right design partners 20:30 Why founders must focus on a niche 22:00 Lessons from building metering before billing 24:00 Is AI overhyped? What will last 25:30 Multi-cloud strategy and competing with hyperscalers 27:00 Final thoughts on AI infrastructure opportunity ________________________________________________________________ 🔗 Connect with Puneet Gupta →   / puneetguptausa   🔗 Connect with Mala Ramakrishnan →   / malaramakrishnan   🎧 Subscribe to the podcast Youtube:    / @mala-podcast   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NIDE4c... Apple Podcast: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-... Visit our Website: www.malaramakrishnan.com | www.founderscreative.ai