Elliot Foreman and Andrew DeLave from ProsperOps joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss automated cloud cost optimization through commitment management. As Google go-to-market director and senior FinOps specialist, they explain how their platform manages over $4 billion in cloud spend by automating reserved instances, committed use discounts, and savings plans across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The conversation covers the psychology behind commitment hesitation, break-even point mathematics for cloud discounts, workload volatility optimization, and why they avoid AI in favor of deterministic algorithms for financial decisions. They share insights on managing complex multi-cloud environments, the human vs automation debate in FinOps, and practical strategies for reducing cloud costs while mitigating commitment risks.

Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify and former co-founder of Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude), joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss the evolution from data quality to decision quality. Patrick shares his experience building data contracts solutions at Atlassian and later developing analytics tracking tools. Patrick challenges the assumption that AI will eliminate the need for structured data. He argues that while LLMs excel at understanding unstructured data, businesses still need deterministic systems for automation and decision-making. Patrick shares insights on why enforcing data quality at the source remains critical, even in an AI-first world, and explains his shift from analytics to CRM while maintaining focus on customer data unification and business impact over technical perfectionism.Tune in!