Fixing the economics of AI: How to reduce compute costs by up to 40%

Leila Nouri2024-06-18 | 5 min read

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The AI landscape is evolving rapidly, with the market for big data workloads projected to reach $229.4 billion by 2025, and the GenAI software market is forecasted to grow tenfold by 2028, reaching $36 billion, according to S&P Global. As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises worldwide seek scalable, agile, and cost-effective ways to support their AI workloads. However, effective cost governance remains a significant challenge to scaling AI, since tracking expenses often involves manual work and tagging of all infrastructure assets, or information that lives in siloed systems, making reconciling bills and enforcing chargebacks time-consuming — even for the most well-resourced IT and FinOps teams.

Domino addresses these challenges head-on, offering comprehensive FinOps capabilities designed to drastically reduce AI compute and storage costs and give FinOps back control and visibility and control to budget owners. By leveraging a combination of intelligent cost control features and FinOps reporting, budget-setting, and alerting capabilities in a single pane of glass, Domino customers can save an average of $900,000 over three years or up to 40% on their IT infrastructure costs. Calculate your savings with Domino’s ROI Calculator.

Introducing Domino FinOps

Today, enterprises, especially large and intricate ones, encounter significant hurdles in managing the escalating costs associated with AI. The traditional methods of tracking expenditures across dispersed teams, diverse tools, and multiple cloud platforms rely heavily on manual tagging of infrastructure, a process marred by inefficiencies and inaccuracies. Moreover, the dearth of insightful analytics further exacerbates the problem, leaving managers grappling with the task of controlling, predicting, and optimizing AI spending over the long term.

Domino FinOps was designed to address these challenges, offering a comprehensive approach to tackling the complexities of AI economics. Here are a few strategic recommendations to consider.

Discover your top cost drivers

With Domino FinOps, organizations can view reports with granular attribution of compute and storage spending across various dimensions such as users, projects, organizational units, compute clusters, and hardware tiers — across all infrastructures, such as on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multicloud — all in a single pane of glass. Granular cost attribution provides accurate information without any manual tagging of infrastructure assets, and it is a source of invaluable insights into top cost drivers, enabling data-driven decisions in the long term.


Proactively control spending with budgets and alerts

With Domino FinOps Budgets and Alerts, enterprises can customize budgets tailored to specific teams and projects. Administrators can also set automated alerts and determine who receives them; this serves as an early warning mechanism, promptly notifying stakeholders when spending thresholds approach critical levels (e.g., 75%). This proactive approach also empowers organizations to prevent cost overruns and budget depletion, safeguarding AI programs and stakeholders.

Simplify chargebacks and showbacks

Domino FinOps seamlessly integrates with organizations' chargeback policies by embedding your organization's custom billing codes into Domino, for seamless reporting without manual work. Administrators also receive real-time visibility into cloud invoices, including savings plans, discounts, special instance pricing, and Enterprise Discount Programs (EDPs), across all of their cloud providers, ensuring transparency and accuracy in a single pane of glass. Additionally, administrators can export data to preferred visualization tools or utilize Domino's intuitive Dash App to enhance accessibility and usability, further streamlining financial management processes.

Manage costs with smart automation and governance guardrails

In addition to Domino FinOps, the Domino Enterprise AI Platform also includes a suite of intelligent cost management features, including customizable hardware tiers, storage quotas, auto-pause and auto-shutdown workspaces, auto-scaling clusters, and access to low-cost on-premises hardware via hybrid cloud options — all aimed at resource optimization, and reducing wasteful spending without throttling innovation.

By providing unified cost visibility, predictive analytics, and automated controls, Domino FinOps empowers organizations to harness AI's full potential while mitigating the financial risks associated with its adoption. With Domino FinOps, enterprises can not only lower AI costs, but they can scale operations, and accelerate time-to-value by responsibly managing costs.

Next steps

Explore more details on how to optimize the economics of AI and reduce costs by checking out the Domino FinOps page.


Leila Nouri, Director of Product Marketing at Domino Data Lab, is an innovative and data-driven product marketing leader with 15+ years of experience building high-performing teams, go-to-market campaigns, and new revenue streams for startups and Fortune 500 companies.