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Cross-industry

Cloud cost optimization with agentic AI

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Business challenge and opportunity

Organizations have increased cloud spend by more than 30% on average from 2024-2025.1 However, given that 70% of CEOs believe they arrived at their current cloud environment by accident, rather than design, some of that additional spend is likely adding to existing complexity rather than increasing capacity or capabilities.1

For FinOps and engineering teams, forecasting and controlling cloud costs is hard because relevant data is often spread across multiple siloed tools and disparate metrics. Identifying underlying drivers of cost requires significant manual work, and vendor-supplied recommendations for optimization are typically unclear. In short: too much data and not enough insight. And given the dynamism of cloud workloads, any clarity around costs tends to be short-lived.

Agentic AI empowers businesses to take back control over cloud costs. With the right governance and security tooling in place, AI agents can work continuously and autonomously to detect issues, provide real-time insight, diagnose and explain cost changes, and propose targeted actions to reduce cloud costs. What's more, AI agents can work within IT-policy guardrails to execute cost-saving actions — with minimal human oversight.

Technical challenges

Training and deploying AI agents that view, interact with, and manage hybrid cloud resources can create both technical challenges and risks.

number 01

Local and national regulatory standards typically require robust governance around any AI deployment, demanding expertise that may not already be present in-house.

number 02

Proprietary enterprise data must be protected from being uploaded to the public cloud or public large language models (LLMs), requiring deep security skills.

number 03

Agents should integrate with native services on hyperscaler platforms to source real-time cost and consumption metrics.

number 04

Agents must adhere to existing corporate security policies and require tightly restricted roles and responsibilities to avoid potential security breaches.

number 05

Robust guardrails must be developed to enforce boundaries on the scope, activity and lifecycle of AI agents, to avoid any perceived loss of control.

Our solution

Using the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework, Kyndryl delivers AI agents that help organizations better understand and control their costs across onsite and cloud infrastructure. Built according to hyperscaler best practices and able to integrate directly with native cost-management tools on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kyndryl agents continuously analyze resources and deliver actionable recommendations.

The Kyndryl agentic AI solution for cloud-cost optimization:

Acts as an expert assistant, understanding questions in natural language and delivering targeted recommendations to optimize costs.

Automatically identify opportunities, removing the need to hunt through dashboards or perform manual analysis on complex datasets from multiple sources. Kyndryl Bridge can correlate signals from spread out data repositories to observe and orchestrate insights.

Enables analysts to quickly get actionable recommendations for questions like: "Are my costs higher than usual?", "How can I reduce spending on this system by 20%?" or "What are my three most expensive services?".

Offers real-time analysis and forecasting, helping organizations uncover potential cost savings and improve future budgeting.

Cuts compliance and security risks by embedding governance and security policies into workflows.

Optionally, using pre-defined permissions, executes cost-optimization tasks such as shutting down unused resources or migrating workloads to lower-cost platforms.

 

One Kyndryl professional services customer has reduced cloud costs by 20% using this agentic solution.2

Benefits you could achieve

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The Kyndryl cloud cost optimization solution helps organizations gain real-time insight and cost control, replacing hours of manual analysis with instant responses to complex questions in natural language. The solution automatically identifies opportunities to reduce waste and inefficiency in cloud resources, helping deliver cost savings within just months.

  • Discover, analyze, understand: AI agents monitor changing costs across the entire hybrid cloud landscape in real time, enabling faster response to rising costs.
  • Gain insights faster: IT teams save time and effort by interacting in natural language.
  • Shift FinOps from reactive reporting to autonomous intelligence: control cloud spend by setting business objectives and having AI agents respond in real-time to changing conditions and opportunities.

Accelerate your journey to AI-native

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Why Kyndryl

With decades of mission-critical operations experience, we bring deep expertise in designing, building, and managing AI across complex IT estates.

The Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework brings together the right governance and security controls and human oversight to enable businesses to move beyond isolated pilots to integrated, intelligent systems. It combines secure, scalable agent orchestration with real-time observability and governance, powered by Kyndryl Bridge.

Through Kyndryl Consult, we align AI strategy with business outcomes. Kyndryl Vital provides proven user-centered design and rapid prototyping. And our trusted delivery experts support frictionless integration and help with reskilling and upskilling to build the foundation for success at scale.

We apply a forward engineering approach — using insights from existing systems to design and deploy future-ready AI agents and architectures that are adaptive, resilient, and scalable. Our method is grounded in open ecosystems, data sovereignty, and transparent decision-making.

And with a carefully selected alliance ecosystem — across cloud, data, and AI — we bring the right partners and technologies together to design fit for purpose solutions and orchestrate AI at scale without disrupting the business.

With Kyndryl, AI becomes a core capability — not just a tool — driving productivity, innovation, and growth.

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  1. Readiness Report: Unlocking Cloud Readiness, Kyndryl, 2025
  2. Kyndryl internal data