Written By
Ronnie Shvueli
You can now create a Finout Agent by chatting with Billy, Finout’s AI FinOps Assistant. Tell Billy what you want to watch and it builds the Agent, or ask where to start and it uses your cost data to show where you have gaps. Nothing is created until you approve it.
More Waste to Watch, With the Same Team
Most teams can name the kinds of waste they likely have: idle instances left over from a test, volumes nobody detached, dev databases running all weekend. What's harder is knowing where each one is today, across every account and team, and catching the new ones as they appear. Doing that means checking every account, often – and nobody has time to do it by hand.
Automated detection should close that gap, but setting it up has required expertise. You choose a provider, a service and a use case, then decide on filters, a lookback window, thresholds and how much headroom to leave. Each choice depends on the one before it. That's a reasonable job for a FinOps lead, and a hard one for an engineer who just wants to stop paying for idle capacity.
So detection usually stays with FinOps, who have never had more on their plate than now. With AI spend in the mix, they’re covering more providers, more teams and faster-moving costs than ever. Every new check competes with everything else they’re doing to keep savings from slipping through the cracks.
What We Built: Billy Builds Finout Agents
Anyone with permission to create Agents can now do it with Billy. Billy is built on the Finout data layer, so it already has your full business context, including your costs, usage and the Agents you already have running. Billy can:
- Build an Agent from a plain-language description of what you want to watch
- Show what your existing Agents already cover and where the gaps are
- Recommend Agents to close those gaps, without duplicating the ones you already have
For example, you can ask Billy for your top five areas of waste, and it will guide you to the Agents worth building to target them (see our Billy cheat sheet).
Once you choose a recommended Agent to build, or describe your own, Billy asks a few follow-up questions and shows you a draft Agent to approve. Nothing is created until you approve it. Creating Agents by chatting with Billy is now in Beta.
Where Billy Fits in Finout Agents
You stay in control. Admins decide who can create Agents, and nothing runs until someone approves the draft. An Agent created through Billy works like any other Agent: it runs daily using the read-only access you've given Finout, and every resource it matches becomes a Finding with its estimated savings and status.
Creating an Agent is also the first step in a longer chain. Your conversation with Billy produces a Detection Agent, which produces Findings. The Investigation Agent then digs into each Finding to identify the ‘why’ and the owner. Then, the Orchestration Agent (coming soon) will take Findings and follow the Workflows that you set, automating as much or as little as your team is comfortable with.
How It Works
- 1. Tell Billy what you want to save on. Open Billy and describe the goal in plain language. One sentence is enough. Or, if you’re not sure what you want to save on, ask Billy where you should start, and it will show where your current Agents leave gaps.
- 2. Answer a few follow-up questions. Billy asks about anything your request leaves open, such as scope, environment or what counts as idle.
- 3. Approve the draft Agent. Billy shows you the draft Agent it plans to create. Nothing is created until you approve it.
- 4. Get Findings. Once approved, the Agent runs daily. Matching resources show up as Findings, each with its estimated savings, ready to investigate.
Example: Unused EBS volumes
The next day, unattached volumes in production appear in Findings, each with its estimated savings.
More Coverage, Without More Work
Setting up an Agent used to take FinOps expertise and time, so coverage depended on how many checks the FinOps team could configure. Now Billy shows you where the gaps are and does the setup with you, so every idea for a saving can become an Agent that runs checks and catches waste every day.
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