Last week — August 4, 2026 — a new organization called the Tokenomics Foundation was officially launched by the Linux Foundation. Its goal is to help businesses better understand, measure, and manage the costs and value of artificial intelligence (AI).
As part of the Linux Foundation, the FinOps Foundation has long served as a vendor-neutral organization, providing frameworks, standards, and guidance to help practitioners manage and optimize cloud spending. At the most recent FinOps X conference, the Linux Foundation announced its intent to launch the Tokenomics Foundation — a new initiative dedicated to developing open industry standards, benchmarks, and best practices for the economics of AI infrastructure. Working in close partnership with the FinOps Foundation, the new organization aims to extend proven cost management principles into the era of token-based AI, helping organizations better measure, manage, and optimize AI costs while connecting AI investments to business value.
As AI adoption grows, organizations are spending more on AI services, but many struggle to understand the true cost of AI and the value it delivers. To address this challenge, the Tokenomics Foundation brings together AI vendors, cloud providers, consultants, and enterprise users to create open standards and best practices for measuring and managing AI economics. More than 30 companies — including IBM, Oracle, SAP, JPMorganChase, ServiceNow, and Accenture — have joined as founding members.
Beyond the price of tokens. The foundation will work on creating open standards, shared definitions, and best practices for AI economics. Its focus goes beyond the sticker price of tokens: it will look at the full AI lifecycle — how tokens are produced, how they are used, and how they create business value. The goal is to help organizations make smarter decisions about AI investments.
Measuring AI ROI. One of the foundation's most important goals is to help companies measure AI return on investment. Today, many organizations know how much they spend on AI — but they struggle to prove the business results it delivers. By creating common frameworks and benchmarks, the foundation hopes to provide a clear, trusted way to connect AI spending with business outcomes.
The FinOps Foundation has set a strong example for the industry. I look forward to seeing the Tokenomics Foundation deliver similar impact by helping organizations better understand, manage, and optimize their AI investments.
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