FOCUS specification eyes AI token economics as AI billing complexity hits a new frontier
AI token economics is creating a data normalization crisis across the technology stack as enterprises scramble to apply consistent financial controls to GPU clusters, AI factories and token-based consumption that existing cloud billing frameworks were never designed to handle.
As the FinOps Foundation Project, a Series of LF Projects LLC, community gathers in San Diego for FinOps X 2026, attention is turning to FOCUS — the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification — and whether the open standard can extend its multicloud billing lingua franca to cover a new generation of AI spending. Among organizations spending $100 million or more annually, roughly 68% are already using or experimenting with FOCUS-formatted data, signaling broad momentum for a common billing language, according to Shawn Alpay (pictured, right), director of data engineering at FinOps.
“The data is not normalized across providers, across technology categories, public cloud, AI, SaaS, etc,” Alpay said. “Being able to tell that story with the same names of the columns, with the same definitions of the allowed values … being able to have that story told the same way across all providers — it’s incredibly valuable. And then to be able to land that into your data lake, your data store, your data warehouse, just shorten the time it takes to get to market for your organization’s analytical needs, your accounting needs, your financial needs.”
