Ebony Sykes is the founder of InsurSuccess, a firm helping independent Medicare insurance agents build financial data sovereignty and operational efficiency in an AI-enabled market. Her core argument is simple and countercultural: before you automate anything, get your processes right - because AI scaled on top of broken workflows just produces more broken outcomes, faster.This episode covers how Ebony measures success by lifestyle improvement rather than output metrics, why she pivoted her own product delivery mid-growth when it was already working, and what the insurance industry's AI reckoning actually looks like on the ground.

Ebony Sykes is the founder of InsurSuccess, a firm dedicated to operational excellence and financial performance for independent Medicare insurance agents. With deep roots in change management and process design, she builds browser-based, human-in-the-loop automation tools that reduce administrative burden without replacing the human relationships at the center of insurance work. She also hosts the podcast Mind Over Machine.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/

This episode covers how Emily Allen used CloudZero data to analyze AI tool usage across her organization, identify model-level inefficiencies — specifically the over-reliance on Claude Opus for tasks better suited to Sonnet — and generate approximately $30K in annualized savings through targeted conversations with internal teams. She also addresses the broader challenge finance leaders face with AI spend: the shift from centralized procurement to distributed, card-swipe adoption, and what that means for visibility and accountability.

Emily Allen is the Director of Finance and Accounting at CloudZero, where she sits in the rare position of actively using the product she helps support financially. A CPA with Big Four roots, she has held finance roles at CarGurus and Roku before landing at CloudZero, where her
proximity to the product gives her a practitioner's view of how FinOps tooling can serve finance teams beyond the engineering org. Her perspective in this episode is grounded in hands-on execution — not theory.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/

This episode covers how Corin is approaching the new layer of complexity that AI introduces: governing access without blocking engineering velocity, building a centralized LLM API gateway (LiteLLM) to provide secure, auditable, and cost-attributed AI access at scale, and keeping an eye on the cloud spend that teams are quietly leaving behind while chasing the next model release. He also shares how carbon footprint data has become an unexpected but effective lever in convincing engineering teams to make smarter infrastructure decisions.

Corin Bishop manages public cloud operations at Cloudera, a $1B+ enterprise data company, where he is responsible for both keeping multi-cloud infrastructure running and ensuring that every dollar spent on AWS, GCP, and Azure is owned, allocated, and accounted for. He introduced FinOps as a formal practice at Cloudera from scratch and has driven it largely as a one-person function, using a combination of tooling, cross-functional partnership, and governance discipline. His current work spans AI access governance, LLM cost attribution, and cloud carbon footprint reporting.

Learn more at https://www.cloudzero.com/