At SAMS Europe 2026, the conversation about software asset management (SAM) extended beyond licenses to the value organizations get from technology. As software as a service (SaaS), cloud, and AI spending overlap, separate views of contracts and consumption leave important questions unanswered. In our keynote on the first morning, Thomas Kools, ITAM, FinOps and Software Sourcing Solutions Specialist, and I addressed that challenge in ‘The new cost equation: ITAM, FinOps, and Tokenomics’, making the case for shared visibility and accountability. The starting point we recommend is practical: bring IT asset management (ITAM) and FinOps together around business outcomes, without requiring a team merger.
Technology value needs a common language
SAMS Europe took place in Amsterdam on September 28 and 29, 2026. Across the conference, I heard a consistent theme: better decisions need communication, reliable data, and people who can act on what the data shows. Savings matter, but they are not the whole story. I believe teams also need to explain how technology supports business priorities, where risk sits, and what changes will improve results.
The first day program reflected those priorities. I heard ABB focus on governance and stakeholder engagement, while Eurofins connected transparent internal chargeback with demand and usage. ABN AMRO addressed alignment across Procurement, Contract Management, and SAM. For me, these topics pointed to a shared challenge: when teams use different information and decision processes, even a clear cost signal can be difficult to turn into action.
That broader focus does not make the basics less important; we know that data quality, incomplete visibility, and the burden of audits remain practical concerns for SAM and ITAM teams. The takeaway is to connect those disciplines to a wider view of technology value, not leave them behind. Good governance needs both an understanding of the agreement and an understanding of what is happening in practice.
On day two, my colleague Tamara Lajara, our Global FinOps Product Manager, hosted a FinOps World Café session. The roundtable-style discussion brought together companies from across Europe, the Nordics, and beyond to compare the challenges and opportunities SAM and ITAM teams face as they engage with FinOps and work to bring AI usage and spending under control within their organizations. What stood out to me here was the need for these teams to build on their existing strengths in governance, ownership, and vendor management, while developing a clearer view of consumption, business value, and the new risks created by decentralized AI adoption.
SoftwareOne connects contracts, consumption, and outcomes
In our presentation, Thomas and I brought those perspectives together. We explained how ITAM contributes knowledge of contracts, entitlements, use rights, compliance, renewals, and audit exposure, while FinOps contributes live consumption data, cost allocation, forecasting, commitment planning, and insight into unusual usage. Each answers different questions. Together, they can help teams ask a better one: what business outcome are we getting from software, SaaS, cloud, and AI spend?
I see AI making that connection especially important. A tool might be billed per user, token, credit, or unit of capacity. An embedded SaaS feature can introduce AI spending into an existing subscription, while coding agents and connected APIs can generate ongoing consumption. Ownership can become unclear when the person buying the service is not the person directing its use. In my view, a review alone will not explain that behavior, and a standalone usage dashboard will not explain the contractual implications.
We use Tokenomics to describe how FinOps thinking can be applied to AI, but it’s important to note that the token is only a small part of the cost equation. Infrastructure, databases, and licenses can all contribute to a workload's cost. We recommend looking at the complete workload so teams do not optimize one charge while overlooking another. This also keeps the focus on value: a cheaper model or shorter prompt is useful only if the task still produces the required result.
Start with shared workflows, not a reorganization
Thomas and I outlined five ways to bring ITAM and FinOps closer without merging teams. It should start with a shared charter covering visibility, waste, risk, value, and accountability. Next, agree on a common taxonomy for business units, cost centers, applications, vendors, environments, and owners. This gives teams a common language for comparing data and making decisions, rather than spending every review reconciling labels.
We recommend that the next task is to connect workflows where the overlap is already clear, such as SaaS renewals, bring-your-own-license decisions, and cloud commitment planning. We also suggest establishing a joint monthly review of anomalies, unused licenses, underused resources, and upcoming renewals to maintain a cadence of communication. Finally, measure outcomes through a scorecard that distinguishes realized savings, avoided cost, reduced risk, and investment in innovation.
A negotiated discount, a prevented expense, and an investment in a new capability are different outcomes, even when all create value.
My advice is to choose just one workflow to start and make the handoffs visible. Who brings the contract information? Who explains consumption? Who owns the business decision, and who can implement a change? I find that answering those questions is more useful than adding another dashboard without an agreed way to act. Regular reviews can then turn a one-off improvement into an ongoing practice.
Make AI visible before scaling it
Begin the visibility phase by inventorying sanctioned tools, embedded SaaS AI, API access, coding agents, and pilots, then identifying their owners. Include shadow AI as part of closing visibility gaps and baseline spending by team, model, and use case. Before scaling a use case, define its expected outcome, accountable owner, benefit, and success metric. Without that baseline, a growing bill tells you little about whether the investment is working.
Put guardrails in place before moving to production: budgets, alerts, spend ceilings, model access controls, approvals, shutoff mechanisms, and controls for data exposure. In my experience, governance also needs owners who have the authority to change tools and workloads. A warning has limited value if nobody knows who should respond or what action they can take.
We firmly believe that optimization should address the workload, not just the invoice. Model routing, prompt design, caching, retrieval, and the mix of capacity can all affect cost and results.
At the conference, we shared practical advice about using concise requests, avoiding the temptation to be polite in how you phrase requests to your AI tool (outside of AI, it is often said that politeness and good manners cost nothing, but in the world of AI prompting every ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘would you be able to’ uses tokens and costs you money), sharing best practices, and building reusable skill libraries.
There will be some use cases where it makes sense to build and share reusable prompt libraries, but many functions may not find themselves re-using specific prompts. These approaches can reduce repeated effort and improve consistency. I recommend assessing every change against the use case's success metric so that lower spending does not come at the expense of useful output. One of the easiest wins will be through end-user training – giving them best practices on how to optimize their prompts and (if they have the ability) to select the right model for each use case.
Bringing ITAM, FinOps, and AI together
SAMS Europe 2026 reinforced a practical message for me: technology value depends on visibility, communication, and shared accountability. In our presentation, Thomas and I connected ITAM’s contractual view with FinOps' consumption perspective, then applied both to AI. Tokens belong in that picture, but they do not tell the whole story.
I suggest starting your journey with three questions:
- Who owns AI spending?
- Can each cost be mapped to a business owner?
- Which ITAM and FinOps workflow should you join first?
Use the answers to choose a focused improvement and review its results together. It’s key to not try to do everything at once – this is an ongoing discipline that should be handled with care.
If all this seems overwhelming, remember that you don’t have to do this alone. At SoftwareOne, we can support that work through gauging your FinOps and ITAM maturity, enabling and supporting your existing ITAM and FinOps practices, as well as through our managed services, helping establish the roles, processes, visibility, and governance needed to make technology spending work harder for the business.
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