Transition. The process of changing from one state or condition to another. Sometimes identified as the passage between. The etymology is interesting as the word comes from the Latin transire, which breaks down into trans (across) plus ire (to go). To go across.

I always view this time of year as a transition and it is quite acute for me this summer. Kids are passing between different grades as I have one starting college, and another starting high school. Young adults are entering the work force after graduation. More recently, the summer solstice just passed, and the sun is starting to set a little earlier each day. Summer is also a time of transition where people may choose to relocate for work, for school, for any reason.

According to anthropologists, there are 3 stages of a transition: separation, liminality, and incorporation. Liminality, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It's the stage where you have left the old status and not yet arrived at the new one. The classic description is "betwixt and between," or as some people like to say, "standing in a doorway."

Why am I focusing on Transition … because in technology, we are in a major transition … how we work, how we measure business value, the tools we use … and it's time to call out where we are … In transition.

We have left the old thing. The way we worked five years ago is gone and it is not coming back. But we have not arrived at whatever this new reality will become. And there is a low-grade discomfort a lot of people are feeling right now. It is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It's just what this phase feels like.

And here's what people in a doorway do. They start guessing at the room on the other side. Why … FUD! (Fear, uncertainty, doubt)

Pick any question that actually matters to you and you'll get two confident answers. Agents will run most of the work in the building, or agents are a demo that falls apart in production and the money sits in the narrow workflows nobody mentions. The models commoditize and the price war takes everyone's margin, or one lab pulls ahead and takes the market. Token prices are collapsing, which every vendor shows you on a chart, and yet your bill is climbing anyway, because reasoning models and agent loops burn ten times the tokens to finish the same job.

Look at that last one again, as they aren't in conflict. They're both happening, right now, on your invoice. If a falling price and a rising bill are true at the same time, what is the forecast actually worth to you?

The point is, nobody knows. Not the labs, not the analysts, not the guy with the confident slide. Everyone has an opinion, but the reality has not yet been set.

None of which stops anyone from selling you the certainty, and that's the part to keep an eye out for. A confident roadmap is a product. Plenty of them are created by people who sell whatever they happen to be pointing at. Buy one and be prepared to be left holding an architecture you can't unwind, made on someone else's forecast, for someone else's reasons.

I'm not telling you this so you'll stand still. Standing still is also a bet, and it's a worse one.

You don't get to know which room you walk into. But you do get to decide what you can bring with you. What do you bring? You know what a unit of work costs. Not the monthly total but the unit.

Everything you buy or use has a name attached to it. A real person, not a cost center.

Spend meets a guardrail before it happens, not a report after.

You can answer "who spent this," today, without a two-week reconciliation exercise.

That's the list. It holds whether agents take over or agents flame out. It holds if inference gets ten times cheaper, because cheaper has only ever meant more of it. It holds if the whole thing plateaus. There is no version of the next three years where you regret a single one of them.

Which is the uncomfortable part for some. These are the same things most companies still haven't done for the cloud and SaaS tools they bought a decade ago. Everyone keeps sprinting to the new layer before we've controlled the last one.

Pour the foundation. I keep saying it because it keeps being the answer.

Liminality has no map. That's the definition of it and definitely not a complaint.

So stop optimizing for the forecast and build the thing that survives being wrong.

Written with the help of AI. All the ideas expressed are mine and mine alone.

If you would like your company included in the Spotlight, contact the CloudXray AI Team

Company: CloudXray AI

Category: Managed Services & Consulting

What They Do: FinOps Consulting & Advisory Services; Owners & maintainers of the single largest FinOps company directory (finops.cloudxray.ai)

Why It Matters: Companies still need guidance on implementing FinOps and understanding the landscape of companies that exist