How Orange uses agents to make FinOps everyone's responsibility
Orange transformed FinOps from a reporting task into a shared responsibility by combining community engagement with AI agents, enabling broader adoption and faster ROI across engineering teams.
Orange, the France-based telecom provider, addresses FinOps challenges by organizing FinOps Clean Days where engineering teams collaborate to optimize cloud spending, using gamified leaderboards and mentorship to drive engagement. The initiative, part of a broader FinOps Community of Practice supported by Google Cloud Consulting, has achieved a Net Promoter Score above 70 among its 100-plus members, reflecting strong internal adoption. The program aligns with McKinsey’s four building blocks of change, emphasizing communication, protected collaborative time, and visible quick wins to embed FinOps accountability across teams.
The FinOps Community of Practice at Orange operates through standardized communication channels, sharing optimizations and billing updates to ensure every session delivers actionable value. This approach mirrors Orange’s cloud security model, where shared responsibility is reinforced through deliberate change management and cross-stakeholder involvement in AI spending decisions. The Clean Days concept emerged from recognizing that agile teams prioritize delivery backlogs over optimization, prompting Orange to create protected, collaborative time for FinOps work.
AI agents extend Orange’s FinOps efforts by automating complex tasks and reducing friction for individuals, targeting gaps in awareness, bandwidth, and complexity. Read-only agents can push real-time cost data into daily tools, while remediation agents identify quick wins as ready-to-merge code changes, and orchestration agents simplify manual reporting processes. Orange advises organizations to introduce agents sequentially: first informational, then suggestive, and only later action-oriented to manage operational risk effectively.
Orange’s FinOps transformation highlights the importance of cultural change before technological scaling. Google Cloud Consulting supports organizations in building similar community practices, while the Gemini Enterprise App offers a no-code environment for deploying read-only agents. For teams needing deeper customization, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform provides advanced tools for agent development and governance, enabling FinOps actions to occur where the work is done.