​Ask most enterprise technology leaders how their cloud cost program is doing, and you’ll likely hear the same answer: “We’ve done the hard work. We rightsized instances, negotiated committed-use discounts, scheduled non-production environments to shut down at night and built dashboards that give finance and engineering a shared view of the bill. The low-hanging fruit is gone.” And yet the waste is climbing again. Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud report put estimated wasted cloud spend at 29%, the first increase in five years. That should tell every leader something uncomfortable: the playbook that got us this far has quietly reached its ceiling. The next gains won’t come from a better dashboard or a sharper discount. They’ll likely come from autonomy.

Full report : The agentic AI frontier in cloud cost optimization isn’t only about spending less; it’s about changing what “optimized” means.