Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report is an annual research study that tracks how organizations are using cloud, SaaS and AI, and how they’re managing cost and governance as environments grow more complex.

The 2026 edition is based on a survey of 753 cloud decision-makers and highlights several key shifts:

• Cloud success is moving from pure cost savings to value delivered to business units
• Generative AI (GenAI) has become one of the most widely used public cloud services, reaching 58% adoption
• Hybrid cloud dominates, with 73% of organizations combining public and private cloud
• Cloud waste has increased again, with 29% wasted spend reported
• Governance structures are maturing: 71% have a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) and 63% have a FinOps team

The report is especially useful for:

• IT leaders and CIOs shaping cloud and AI strategy
• Cloud architects and engineering leaders making workload placement and design decisions
• FinOps and cloud cost management teams moving from explaining spend to influencing architecture
• Procurement and finance stakeholders responsible for technology investments and vendor negotiations

Because it covers organizations from SMBs to large enterprises, you can use the benchmarks to see how your cloud maturity, AI adoption, hybrid strategy and governance model compare to your peers.

The 2026 report shows a clear move away from viewing cloud purely as a cost-saving tool and toward treating it as a driver of business value.

Key data points from the survey:

• 64% of organizations now use value delivered to business units as their top metric for cloud progress, up 12 percentage points from last year.
• Cost efficiency as a primary metric dropped by 6 percentage points, even though it still matters.
• Use of unit economics (measuring cost per service and linking consumption to outcomes) increased from 40% to 49%.

What this means in practice:

• FinOps is evolving from a cost-control function into a strategic capability focused on technology value.
• Teams are shifting left—getting involved earlier in design and migration to influence architecture, not just report on spend after the fact.
• Cloud is being treated less as infrastructure and more as a strategic lever for growth, innovation and competitive advantage.

For your organization, this suggests a few next steps:

• Balance traditional KPIs (like savings and workloads migrated) with value-based metrics tied to business outcomes.
• Invest in unit economics so you can understand cost per product, service or feature.
• Ensure your FinOps and architecture teams collaborate early, especially on new AI and data-intensive workloads.

The report shows that AI—especially Generative AI (GenAI)—is reshaping cloud economics, risk, and governance.

Key findings:

• GenAI is now the third most widely used public cloud service, with adoption rising from 50% to 58%.
• Cloud-based AI workloads are contributing to an increase in wasted cloud spend, now at 29%, reversing a five-year improvement trend.
• Top concerns for cloud-based AI initiatives are:
  • Security and compliance risks
  • Data quality
  • Difficulty forecasting unpredictable usage patterns

Why this matters for cost and planning:

• AI workloads behave differently from traditional apps, with spiky, harder-to-predict usage and new pricing models.
• This makes budgeting, forecasting and commitment planning more complex.
• As GenAI moves from pilots to everyday workflows, the financial impact becomes material rather than experimental.

How organizations are responding:

• A significant majority of large enterprises now have a dedicated AI leader or governance team, signaling that AI is treated as a core business capability.
• FinOps practices are being extended to include AI-specific planning, controls and reporting.
• There is growing emphasis on visibility into AI consumption across apps, agents, models, data and compute so teams can manage both cost and risk.

In short, GenAI is pushing organizations to reimagine how they manage cloud value, risk and spend. Strong governance—spanning cloud, SaaS and AI—is becoming a prerequisite for scaling AI with confidence.