FinOps X 2026 | Tammy Burnitt, UIPath

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Tammy Burnitt

Director of FinOps

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Tammy Burnitt, UIPath

Tammy Burnitt

Director of FinOps UIPath

In this interview from FinOps X 2026, Tammy Burnitt, director of FinOps at UiPath, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how FinOps is evolving from cloud cost management into a discipline for governing AI value and variable spend across the enterprise. Burnitt draws on her experience as an internal practitioner to outline the growing complexity of technology spend in the AI era. She explains why visibility into variable spend — spanning cloud tokens, SaaS tokens and hidden costs like security and networking — has becom... Read more

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What has your experience been at the FinOps X show, and what conversations or themes have you been hearing? add

How should organizations manage and account for experimental AI spending versus outcome-driven (production) AI spending, and should token costs for experiments be treated differently? add

What is your role at UiPath with respect to FinOps—do you focus on internal or customer-facing activities—and how do you spend your day managing AI-related spending (e.g., how do you break down spend by product, cloud, marketplace, and SaaS)? add

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Tammy Burnitt, UIPath

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back around to theCUBE's live stream here at FinOps X in San Diego 2026. This is end of day one as we wrap up. We're bringing it all together. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Paul Nashawaty, my cohost from theCUBE Research. We're unpacking it all. Tammy Burnitt is here, Director of FinOps at UiPath. Of course, theCUBE's been covering their event every year. Big part of Ui's success has been in a lot of the automation and agentic. You know this world, but now the game has changed because you have non-deterministic and cloud is powering everything. So welcome to theCUBE.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Thank you. Thank you.

John Furrier

>> Okay. So what's it been like for you at the show? What have been some of the conversations you've been hearing? Obviously the keynote was extremely well received. They announced the Tokenomics Foundation as a sister organization to the FinOps Foundation. So playing together, but that seems to be a . What are you hearing?

Tammy Burnitt

>> I'm hearing tokens obviously is part of the problem, but I'm hearing ... When I talk to people, I'm like, "What's working, what's not working? What's a priority? Where are the blind spots?" So tokens, at least in my conversations, you've got your cloud tokens, but then you've got your SaaS token. And where's your variable spend? What's your visibility to your variable spend? Telemetry is also a challenge in terms of observability. And then how much telemetry do you capture and how long do you keep it for? And then total cost to serve. You really need to understand how much your products are costing you. There's always those hidden fees like security, networking. And so I think unit metrics is a broad term, but getting really concise in terms of how much does a given product cost and then how do you factor in a token that resulted in something significant or a token that's just sitting there churning?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, exactly. And there's a lot that you said that I had a reaction to. And one of the things that you said is from the observability perspective, I used to kind of somewhat joke and say the number one consumer of storage is observability. And say you basically have to be a storage of admin in order to be an observability admin, right.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Absolutely.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So, 'cause you're collecting a bunch of logs, you're not sure what to do with it and then that data needs to be processed and identified. So now we have the ability with AI to kind of go through this, but you touched on a couple of other things and this has kind of been a theme throughout the day for, at least for us, for me and such, is there's AI spend that's driving outcomes and then there's experimental AI and that should be treated very different because the cost around that should be treated different. What are your thoughts?

Tammy Burnitt

>> Well, I think when you look at experimental spend, I think you have to, before you can just say, here's some amazing AI technology and go and use it. I think you need to understand what are the drivers behind that? What are the edge cases? So do you have a metric or a value of measure before you forage into experimental spend? Do you have a funnel? How do you prevent duplication of effort? How do we know who's working on what? Experimental spend can also kind of get you visibility, right. So maybe someone's working on some experimental spend and maybe that's causing a priority to fall behind. But I think in terms of experimental spend, controlling it and making sure that if someone is going to use it, there's a fundamental measure after you deduct the spend of the experiment, like, are we finishing sprints earlier? Are we bringing in some cost optimization? Are we bringing in more revenue?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Should there be a different cost though for those tokens?

Tammy Burnitt

>> Well, I think you have to ... In my experience, there's your IT spend and then some people put that experimental spend maybe in a discretionary fund. So in some cases it is segregated, but I think to go into it blindly without a funnel, a centralized funnel, and then some edge cases to measure what was the value, I think that's where a lot of people are, it can get out of control pretty quickly if you don't kind of put some parameters around it.

John Furrier

>> Tammy, talk about your role at UiPath and FinOps. Are you internal to UiPath? Are you thinking about customers, vice versa? How do you spend your day?

Tammy Burnitt

>> So as a practitioner, I spend my day looking at AI. So that's just internal, right. I mean, there are conversation in terms of AI spend. We're getting the right people in the right room and looking at the right data. So I think internal spend, that's a certain data set and that's a certain parameter. And then when you look at data in a perspective other than internal, that requires more people to be in the room and that requires different data sets that may be confidential. And so you have to separate those conversations out, but also make sure the right people are at the table.

John Furrier

>> On the internal stuff, how are you guys looking at this? I can imagine knowing UiPath appetite for AI tooling and services is probably really high.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Yeah. In terms of being a practitioner and looking at AI spend, I think you have to break it down. Again, you have to know what your spend is by product, regardless of what cloud you're in. And then we've done a good job of it at cloud. Now we have to factor in the marketplace and the SaaS and all of the extra spend, right. Or maybe you have some other tools in place like the security or the networking. And so it's really kind of, you have to identify what your total cost to serve is and then connect the dots from there, right.

John Furrier

>> You talk to other practitioners.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Is it kind of like looking at each other like, "Look at us, we're the frontier"? What is the vibe like and what are some of the inside the ropes conversations that's happening from peer-to-peer conversations? You guys sharing best practices, trying to reign in the chaos? Is it get visibility? What's the main topics?

Tammy Burnitt

>> That's an excellent question. For me, speaking as a practitioner, I am absolutely in the community. I'm out there talking every day to everyone saying, "What's working? What's new? What's hot?" And we absolutely share. We cry. We get on the couch, we get the tissue. We are in this together. We're kind of like a family and so absolutely. I think part of being, you know, staying on the forefront of AI, it requires you to get involved in the community and network with your peers in the community. Some people are crawl and some people are run and some people are walk. So yeah.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And what's changed the most in the past year in the FinOps community that you could see as notable? Notable change, velocity-

Tammy Burnitt

>> Variable spend.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Variable spend. I think if you look at it as like you're basically giving somebody a procurement pass and it's a rapidly exponentially multiplying pass, right. So I think you have to look at how you procure technology differently and tokens kind of opened our eyes to that, right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. But speaking of change, I mean, I think tokens open your eyes to the cost change, you're right, it kind of can grow exponentially. What about the roles and the functions of jobs? Like, the jobs are changing, right.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Jobs are changing.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So everything's changing.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Everything is changing.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So what does this mean?

Tammy Burnitt

>> Well, we have to work smarter, not harder. I think the practitioners and anyone that's involved in AI today is going to have to understand not only how to architect AI, but how to use AI to do their jobs more efficiently, like, efficiency gains or saving some money or I think it is inevitable that we will all need to use some component of AI to do our jobs in the future.

John Furrier

>> Has there been any mindset shifts because we were commenting earlier that with cloud, you had builders and operators and obviously securities built in. Now you got builders, operators and investors 'cause the investment role is about not just getting the money, managing the procurement pass, but the practitioners have to think like investors because what they save they can kep in so there's really kind of an acute entrepreneurial thinking. Has there been a mindset muscle change or a new muscle developing or ...

Tammy Burnitt

>> Absolutely. I can speak as like a very small practitioner or a practitioner of one, if you will. I think your job is to find budget for yourself and then say, if you're going and asking questions like, "If I could give you X figure added to a budget, what would we do with that?" If I could save engineers 15 hours a day, what would we do with that? So you become like this little ecosystem of finding money and then ... But I also talk about the value statement. So if we find the money, what will we do with the money? But you're absolutely ... You nailed it. You've got to go after it and you've got ... It's all how you frame it and position it as a practitioner.

John Furrier

>> And the value proposition for the projects are outcome-based. So you can also tie it to that.

Tammy Burnitt

>> You do.

John Furrier

>> So you can actually close the loop versus like what happened after the fact? No postmortem really if you wire it up right.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Well, if you wire it up right and if you're dialed into, like, so we can take it a step further, if you're dialed into your SRE community and sprint planning, not only are you identifying budget, but you're saying ... I always like to say, "I like the opportunities that have the biggest margins and the shortest runway to delivery," or, "What is the time to value or the time to repay?" So those are the conversations that you're getting in and it's a little tech and it's a little financial.

John Furrier

>> Now personal question, I guess it's not really a personal, it's more of a business-personal question. Do you get called into the CFO's office, they're like, "Hey, what are you working on?" Is there like a masterclass that you then put on to train the trainer? Because as you guys in the community are on the front lines, wipe away those tears and you have tears of joy when you have home runs, hits. Are you getting called in to-

Tammy Burnitt

>> Well-

John Furrier

>> ... debrief other executives?

Tammy Burnitt

>> Well, I absolutely do kind of cascade learnings and opportunities across the organization. I find myself in more and more conversations with leadership though and whether it's you're thinking about working on renegotiating a commercial or you're coming in on a conversation after an acquisition or a merger, like, there's so many components and tie-ins or your alliances team, right. You have to be multifaceted and you have to be dialed into all these leadership conversations to your point. So you do get called in in some form or fashion or, "Hey, why is Tammy not at this table? She needs to be in this conversation," so-

John Furrier

>> Yeah. I mean, the idea of delivery has always been kind of a different thing, but now you're always on because no one wants a black box of cost.

Tammy Burnitt

>> You got to be suited up and ready to go into the game, for sure.

John Furrier

>> Tammy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Loved the commentary.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Thank you.

John Furrier

>> You got a superpower developing there, finding money. I love that. I'm going to use that.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Finding money.

John Furrier

>> That's the best way to get money is to find it.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Yeah, it is.

John Furrier

>> Thank you so much.

Tammy Burnitt

>> Thank you.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you, Tammy.

John Furrier

>> I'm John Furrier with Paul Nashawaty. Wrapping up day one. We got a full day tomorrow. We're getting all the action at the FinOps Foundation, of course. Now we have the Tokenomics Foundation kind of coming together, kind of organizing around to identify the cost so they can tie it to the value that's accelerating with generative AI. And of course, agents are right around the corner being built and rolled out. We'll see you tomorrow.