Hi! I'm Girish, an AWS Community Builder and Cloud Tech Enthusiast with expertise in delivering customer-focused, business-impacting cloud transformation programs of high complexity.
FinOps stands for Financial Operations and as cloud environments grow, managing costs becomes increasingly challenging. While AWS already provides several ways to review billing reports, investigate cost anomalies and identify optimization opportunities, it recently introduced the AWS FinOps Agent to help organizations monitor costs and ask cost-related questions using natural language prompts.
This FinOps Agent was announced in public preview on June 9th, 2026, and is an important step forward in the evolution of agentic AI for cloud financial operations.
In this article, I will walk you through creating your first AWS FinOps Agent and explore how it can help improve cloud financial visibility.
Note: As of June 2026, AWS FinOps Agent is available in Public Preview.
What is AWS FinOps Agent?
AWS FinOps Agent is a frontier agent built on Amazon Bedrock that transforms cloud financial management into a conversational experience. It enables customers to continuously monitor costs, investigate spending anomalies, analyze trends, surface optimization opportunities, and improve cloud financial governance.
Instead of navigating multiple dashboards and reports, you can ask natural language questions such as:
• What was my cost in May 2026 and did it change compared to the prior month?
• How much is the total cost for the last 3 months?
• How many active services are in my account?
• What is my projected cost for the next billing cycle?
To answer these questions, the agent draws on a set of AWS services that you grant access to during setup, including AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, AWS Cost Optimization Hub, AWS Compute Optimizer, and AWS CloudTrail.
By combining insights across these services, it delivers a comprehensive view of your AWS spending and makes FinOps analysis faster, more intuitive, and accessible for both engineering and finance teams.
What We Are Building
In this walkthrough, I will:
- Create an AWS FinOps Agent
- Configure the required permissions
- Enable access to the web application
- Launch the agent
- Ask FinOps questions such as:
- How much did I spend on AWS in May 2026, and was it higher or lower than the previous month?
- Give me a cost summary for May 2026 and highlight any changes from the prior month.
- Can you show me a breakdown of my AWS costs over the past 3 months?
- What has my total AWS expenditure been over the last 3 months?
Prerequisites
Before you begin:
• AWS account
• Appropriate IAM permissions to create roles and agents
• AWS Cost Explorer enabled in your account
• Basic understanding of FinOps concepts
Step-by-Step: Create Your First AWS FinOps Agent
Step 1: Search for AWS FinOps Agent
From the AWS Management Console, search for FinOps Agent in the Services search bar.
Select the service from the search results.
Step 2: Switch to the Supported Region
Before creating the agent, ensure that you are operating in:
- US East (N. Virginia) – us-east-1
As of June 2026, AWS FinOps Agent is only available in the us-east-1 region.
Step 3: Review FinOps Agent Benefits
The landing page provides an overview of the key capabilities offered by the service.
Typical benefits include:
- Cost visibility
- Cost anomaly investigation
- Optimization recommendations
- Resource efficiency insights
- Conversational cost analysis
Take a few moments to review the information before proceeding.
Step 4: Create the Agent
Click Create Agent.
You will be guided through the agent configuration wizard.
Step 5: Configure Agent Details
Provide the following information:
Agent Name
Choose a meaningful name for your agent. For example:
CloudWithGirish-FinOps-Agent
Description
Provide a description that clearly explains the purpose of the agent. For Example:
FinOps agent for monitoring AWS costs, anomalies, and optimization opportunities.
Step 6: Configure IAM Permissions
The agent requires permissions to access AWS cost management services.
You have two options:
Option 1: Auto Generate IAM Role
AWS can automatically create the required IAM role.
In my setup, AWS generated the following role:
FinOpsAgentRole-480a4ebb
Option 2: Use an Existing IAM Role
You can also select an existing role that already includes the required permissions.
For this walkthrough, I used the auto-generated IAM role.
Step 7: Enable Web Application Access
Next, configure how users will interact with the FinOps Agent.
Enable Web Application Access to allow browser-based interaction with the agent.
This provides a simple chat-style interface for querying cost and usage insights.
AWS currently provides two optional third-party integrations.
- Integration with JIRA
- Integration with Slack
For this initial setup, I chose to skip these integrations so I could first validate the core FinOps capabilities.
We will explore integrations in a future deep dive.
Step 9: Review and Create
Review all configuration settings:
- Agent name
- Description
- IAM role
- Web application access
- Integration settings
Once everything looks correct, click Create Agent.
Step 10: Agent Creation Complete
AWS will provision the FinOps Agent in a few moments.
Once completed, you will see a success confirmation indicating the agent is ready.
Step 11: Open the Agent
After creation:
- Select your newly created agent
- Click Open Agent
The FinOps Agent interface will open in a chat-style experience.
Try Your First FinOps Questions
Now comes the fun part.
With the AWS FinOps Agent deployed, let's explore a few practical questions that can help you better understand your AWS spending patterns, service usage, and future cost projections.
In the following examples, you'll see how the agent can answer common FinOps questions using natural language, making it easier to gain cloud cost insights without navigating multiple AWS consoles and reports.
Monthly Cost Analysis
This prompt helps you understand your spending for a specific billing period and compare it with the previous month.
Prompt: What was my cost in May 2026 and did it change compared to the prior month?
Three-Month Cost Trend
Use this prompt to quickly obtain a consolidated view of your AWS spend over the last three months.
Prompt: How much is the total cost for the last 3 months?
Active Services Inventory
This prompt provides visibility into how many AWS services are currently active in your account.
Prompt:How many total active services are in my account?
Cost Forecasting
One of the most valuable FinOps capabilities is forecasting future cloud spend. Use the following prompt to review projected costs for the upcoming billing cycle.
Prompt: What is my projected cost for the next billing cycle?
These examples demonstrate how the AWS FinOps Agent can help answer common financial management questions using natural language, reducing the need to navigate multiple AWS cost management dashboards.
What’s Next?
In a follow-up article, I'll take the FinOps Agent a step further by integrating it with Jira and automating the creation of engineering work items.
Imagine asking:
Create Jira tickets for all high-priority cost optimization recommendations.
The agent can help bridge the gap between cloud financial insights and engineering execution.
Conclusion
In this article, I demonstrated how to create your first AWS FinOps Agent and use it to answer practical cloud financial management questions through a conversational interface. We explored how the agent can help analyze monthly cost comparisons, review multi-month spending trends, identify active AWS services, and forecast future cloud costs using natural language prompts.
Built on Amazon Bedrock and integrated with AWS cost management services, the AWS FinOps Agent transforms traditional FinOps workflows by reducing the need to navigate multiple dashboards and reports. Instead of manually gathering data from Cost Explorer, Cost Optimization Hub, Compute Optimizer, and other services, teams can interact with a single intelligent assistant that provides actionable insights in seconds.
As organizations continue to mature their FinOps practices, intelligent agents like AWS FinOps Agent can help bridge the gap between cloud financial visibility and operational decision-making. By making cost analysis more accessible to engineering, operations, and finance teams, organizations can identify optimization opportunities faster and make more informed decisions about cloud spending.
I believe this is just the beginning of how agentic AI will transform cloud operations. As these agents continue to evolve, they will move beyond providing insights and increasingly help automate actions, recommendations, and governance workflows across the cloud ecosystem.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you found this article insightful.
Watch the video here:
Thanks,
𝒢𝒾𝓇𝒾𝓈𝒽 ℬ𝒽𝒶𝓉𝒾𝒶
𝘈𝘞𝘚 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘉𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳 | 𝘈𝘐 𝘌𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨
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