Ensono’s CFO Scott Grossman and his colleague Jim Piazza have described a problem we hear about constantly in our Data & Digital searches: AI spend is nearly impossible to forecast because vendors keep changing the unit of measurement. Microsoft reports in credits. Snowflake reports in credits. The credits are not the same thing. There is no cross-industry standard forcing alignment, and none is coming soon.
The problem lands on finance teams who were never trained to handle it. Traditional FP&A work assumes you can model costs against known variables. When the pricing unit shifts mid-contract, or when consumption-based billing means your January spend tells you nothing about your March spend, the forecasting skill set changes. Companies need people who can build flexible models, who understand how cloud and AI vendors structure their pricing, and who can translate technical consumption patterns into financial language the board will accept.
We have placed several finance professionals into tech-adjacent companies over the past year where the role specification explicitly mentioned vendor pricing literacy. A Munich-based SaaS company rewrote its FP&A manager spec twice in one search because the CFO realised halfway through that they needed someone who had managed a consumption-based vendor relationship in a previous role. Specifications for finance business partners and controller positions in companies with significant AI commitments increasingly include similar requirements.
The companies hiring now want commercial acumen combined with enough technical curiosity to learn how these billing models work. Pure accounting backgrounds often need to be supplemented with people who have worked in tech-heavy environments or managed complex vendor relationships. A candidate who can explain why their company’s Snowflake bill doubled in Q3 and what they did about it will stand out in these conversations.
Prompted by reporting from Diginomica.