Simplifying AWS Spending for Managed Service Customers with FinOps Center and Agent Bill Embedded Q&A

October 2025

Ironside Group is a leader in Data, Analytics, and AI consulting—helping organizations accelerate their journey from insight to action. With deep expertise spanning data strategy, architecture and engineering, business intelligence, and generative AI, Ironside works with clients to connect business objectives with the right mix of technology and process design. Their mission is simple: empower customers to make smarter, data-driven decisions and move further, faster toward their business goals.

The Challenge: Simplifying AWS Cloud Financial Management for Managed Service Customers

As Ironside expanded its AWS Managed Services practice—running Data, Analytics, and AI workloads across customer estates—one challenge became increasingly clear: customers wanted clarity and control over their AWS spending without having to navigate the complexity of native Cost and Usage data or financial mapping.

Many business users lacked visibility into how their AWS investments aligned to their internal budgets, business units, and projects. Engineering teams were left fielding ad-hoc cost questions or manually preparing reports, slowing down both optimization and collaboration.

Ironside needed a solution that could:

• Bring transparency to AWS cost and usage data in language business users understand
• Integrate natively with AWS-managed environments
• Enable collaboration between financial, procurement, and technical teams
• Support continuous cost optimization through actionable recommendations

The Solution: FinOps Center with Agent Bill Embedded Q&A

To meet these needs, Ironside integrated Cloud Scal3’s FinOps Center and Agent Bill Embedded Q&A into their Managed Service framework.

FinOps Center provides a single pane of glass for understanding AWS spending. It connects native AWS Cost and Usage data with business context—budgets, cost centers, and workload allocations—so both Ironside and their customers’ finance teams can manage cloud costs within a familiar process application.

At the same time, Agent Bill Embedded Q&A extends this experience by bringing Generative-AI-powered insights directly into the FinOps workflow. Built on the Amazon Quick Suite, Agent Bill allows business users to ask natural language questions—such as “Which business unit’s analytics workloads increased month-over-month?”—and receive multi-visual, contextual responses embedded within the FinOps Center application.

This generative interface eliminates the need to navigate multiple dashboards or wait for engineers to run queries. Users simply ask questions and immediately see cost insights—securely scoped to their own financial and organizational view using row-level security (RLS) controls.

“Our customers’ Business Teams want to be actively engaged in their spending, not just wait for the bill to show up. FinOps Center provides transparency into their spending in business terminology they understand—and with Agent Bill, they can now explore their data directly, creating predictability and trust in their AWS investments.”
— Tim Kreytek, CEO, Ironside Group

Empowering Managed Service Customers with Agentic FinOps

Ironside’s Managed Service practice now uses FinOps Center as the foundation for weekly operational and financial governance meetings. Each customer’s business and technical teams review their current AWS spend, identify optimization opportunities, and agree on actions—supported by Cloud Optimization Hub recommendations surfaced within FinOps Center.

With FinOps Center and Agent Bill working together:

• Business teams approve recommendations generated from AWS Cost Optimization Hub data
• Engineering teams implement those changes directly within the managed service environment
• Agent Bill Embedded Q&A tracks the impact of each optimization on budgets and workloads

This closed-loop FinOps process ensures that both cost transparency and cost savings are continuously operationalized—not left as one-time exercises.

Automation and Continuous Improvement

The integration between FinOps Center and Ironside’s AWS Managed Service automates what used to be manual, time-intensive processes. When new account or workload allocations are updated in FinOps Center, those changes automatically flow into the next data refresh cycle through SPICE—ensuring business users always see the most current financial alignment.

Agent Bill’s embedded intelligence further reduces “time on task” by automating context gathering and query generation, helping Managed Service customers spend less time chasing data and more time making informed decisions.

Results and Business Impact

By introducing FinOps Center with Agent Bill Embedded Q&A into their Managed Service framework, Ironside has:

• Simplified AWS cost visibility for business users without requiring console access
• Reduced engineering overhead for generating financial reports and dashboards
• Accelerated cost optimization cycles, turning weekly reviews into continuous improvement sessions
• Enhanced collaboration between finance and technical teams through shared data and common language
• Increased customer satisfaction and retention, as clients now view cloud cost governance as a value-added service, not a burden

“The combination of FinOps Center and Agent Bill has transformed how we engage our Managed Service customers. What used to take multiple reports and meetings now happens in one collaborative workspace. Our customers feel empowered to manage their cloud costs proactively.”
— Ironside Managed Services Team

Step One in Agentic Cloud Financial Management (CFM)

Ironside sees this evolution as just the beginning. Agent Bill Embedded Q&A represents Step 1 in Agentic Cloud Financial Management (CFM)—where AI agents not only answer questions but will soon take action on behalf of users, such as initiating Savings Plan purchases, budget adjustments, or cost allocation updates.

This vision aligns perfectly with Ironside’s broader mission: to help customers harness the power of AI responsibly and pragmatically across their business operations.

Benefit

Through the partnership between Ironside Group and Cloud Scal3, AWS Managed Service customers now benefit from a unified, intelligent financial management experience that combines automation, transparency, and AI-driven insights.

By leveraging FinOps Center and Agent Bill Embedded Q&A, Ironside has redefined what it means to provide Managed Services on AWS—turning cloud financial management from a reactive reporting exercise into a proactive, data-driven discipline.