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How Orange built FinOps accountability, and why agents are next Samuel Moss AI Transformation and FinOps Consultant, Google Celine Devie AI Transformation Consultant, Google At Orange, the leading France-based multinational telecom provider, there are days when engineering teams set aside their delivery backlogs and spend the day cleaning up cloud spend together. There's a leaderboard. There are goodies on the line. Experienced practitioners guide the newcomers, so people learn the work while doing it. By the end of the day, sponsors can see the results. Orange calls these FinOps Clean Days. Together with gamified hackathons, they've earned the company's 100-plus person FinOps community a Net Promoter Score within the organization that’s above 70. Those numbers point at something the wider industry is wrestling with. Recent State of FinOps reports identify getting engineers to take action as one of the top challenges organizations face. Moving from awareness to action means finding ways to build FinOps accountability, and to get teams to genuinely care. That makes FinOps a business change problem. And business change problems have known solutions. We spoke with Camille Marini, the FinOps lead at Orange, to get a deeper understanding of how the company overcame these hurdles to accelerate AI adoption and ROI, and how your organization might follow the same course. Why the Clean Days work Orange has held two principles since it set up its FinOps team. First, Cloud FinOps is a shared responsibility, with every stakeholder in a project involved in their own way. And the only path to that shared responsibility runs through communication and a deliberate change effort. “We insisted on the concept of shared responsibility across the organization for our FinOps practices,” Marini told us. “It’s very similar to how we approach cloud security. We needed to make teams understand that every single stakeholder in a project is involved in FinOps, each in their own way, if we are going to achieve responsible and impactful AI spending and usage.” Those principles led Orange to create a FinOps Community of Practice, with support from Google Cloud Consulting. The team ran it on standardized communication channels so the methodology reached well beyond the central group, and kept the meetings actionable, sharing optimizations and billing updates so every session provided value. The Clean Days came from a clear-eyed reading of how agile teams actually operate. In agile environments with deployment running constantly, optimization work rarely wins against the sprint. Delivery priorities, backlogs, and daily operations take the available time first. So Orange created protected time, made it collaborative, and made it fun. McKinsey's four building blocks of change explain why this approach lands. Any large organizational change, the framework holds, requires action across four areas: - Conviction and understanding: "I know what is expected of me and I agree with it." - Formal mechanisms: "The structures, processes, and systems reinforce the change." - Role modeling: "I see my leaders and colleagues behaving differently." - Talent and skills: "I have the skills and opportunities to behave in a new way." Map Orange's practice onto those blocks and the pattern is visible. Gamification and rewards give engineers colleagues to emulate: The leaderboard makes different behavior visible, and sponsors see the quick wins for themselves. Experienced practitioners guiding novices builds talent and skills through the community itself. The regular sessions, sharing optimizations and billing updates, build the conviction that comes from knowing where the money goes. FinOps activities mapped to the four building blocks of change, with the points where AI agents can reinforce them. What happens beyond 100 people A community of 100 engaged people is an achievement. But in an organization with thousands of engineers, no central FinOps team can reach everyone directly. The question for leaders is how to extend what a community like Orange's creates — the awareness, the shared ownership, the habit of acting — to people the FinOps team will never meet. This is where AI agents extend the capabilities of a FinOps team with two core benefits. They take on complex, time-intensive activities that previously needed a human, and they reduce friction around FinOps for individuals across the business. Getting teams to adopt them takes a strategy aimed at your own organization's pain points, which often come from high cognitive load, unclear accountability, or competing priorities. Start by finding where engagement drops off in your FinOps lifecycle: - An awareness gap: If teams are unsure of their spend impact, an insight agent can push real-time cost data into their daily tools. - A bandwidth gap: If engineers are too busy with backlogs, a remediation agent can identify quick wins and present them as ready-to-merge code changes. - A complexity gap: If reporting feels like a manual chore, an orchestration agent can gather the data and simplify the process. Start with trust, then add autonomy The sensible path runs in sequence. Establish the community practice, the way Orange did. Then introduce read-only agents that inform and suggest. Only once those are established across the community should you build agents that execute changes. Direct action carries operational risk, so manage it carefully. It's also where significant wins often sit. How you build depends on who's building. For teams that want to deploy quickly with minimal code, the Gemini Enterprise App provides a no-code environment for creating agents. For developers who need granular control, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI) offers advanced tools for launching and governing agents built with frameworks like the Agent Development Kit (ADK). Cloud FinOps is moving beyond centralized reporting toward action that happens where the work does. The organizations getting there start with the culture, then use agents to carry it further than any one team could reach. Orange's numbers came out of the community work. Building that foundation is the part worth copying first. When you're ready to extend it, Google Cloud Consulting can help you shape the community practice, and the Gemini Enterprise App is a low-lift way to put your first read-only agent in front of your teams.
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