They Named a Conference After the Unit

FinOps X wrapped, and tokens swallowed the whole keynote. The hallway joke was that next year's event gets renamed Tokenomicon. It isn't a joke. They announced it from the stage: San Diego, June 2027.

Most of the energy went into the cost side, and it's industrialising fast. A Tokenomics Foundation, a standard for AI invoices, vendor billing features stacked on top. Inference, proxies, gateways, egress, ingress, firewalls, storage, each one a meter someone now has to attribute.

What tokens are worth barely came up. The standards bodies and the cloud vendors stayed on cost. The honest treatment of ROI came from Shutterstock's CIO, Courtney Totten, walking through what they'd actually built and the trade-offs behind it. And even there, nobody's putting a clean number on it yet.

If you want signal on AI value, skip the keynote vendors and watch the operators.