Reduce your donations to Azure in 2026

Session 1 – Reduce your donations to Azure in 2026

Date / Time : Thursday, May 14, 2026 | 10:00 AM BST

Speaker : Stefan Denk

We still see Azure customers struggling with consistently leveraging reservations, savings plans, bring-your-own-(Microsoft)-license and benefits from modernizing workloads. In this session, you will learn a no-risk approach to utilize these savings levers that Azure provides you with that you give you an action plan you can work on immediately after the training. Expect a potential to reduce your cloud spend by 15-25% – money which for all intents and purposes your company is donating to Microsoft today.

Session 2 – FinOps for AI or AI for FinOps?

Date / Time : Thursday, May 21, 2026 | 10:00 AM BST

Speaker : Michael Stephenson

You’ve stopped donating to Microsoft on compute. You’ve mastered the reservation mini-game. But what about AI? Because here’s a question worth asking before your next cloud bill arrives: are you managing the cost of AI, or are you using AI to manage your costs? They sound like the same thing. They are not – and mixing them up is an expensive mistake.

In this session we break down the difference between FinOps for AI – bringing financial discipline to your AI workloads before they silently eat your budget – and AI for FinOps – putting machine intelligence to work to make your whole cloud cost practice smarter. We’ll show you where each one applies, how they complement each other, and what you should actually be doing about both in 2026.

Session 3 – Donate even less to Azure in 2026

Date / Time : Thursday, June 04, 2026 | 10:00 AM BST

Speaker : Alexander Golev and Stefan Denk

In the prior session (May 14th) we talked about reservations for compute. Did you know that there is much more you can reserve? Have you figured out “the reservation mini-game” to keep your ever-changing workloads covered with reservations without going crazy in the process – or restarting your donations to Microsoft? We will be looking at additional services where reservations and capacity commitments give you significant rebates, as well as share our approach for playing and winning “the reservation mini-game”.