Governance of AI infrastructure costs has become one of the more pressing problems facing enterprise technology teams. As organisations scale generative AI and agentic applications from proof-of-concept into production, the underlying economics — what tokens cost, what they produce, and whether that production justifies the spend — remain poorly standardised.
The Tokenomics Foundation, launched in early June 2026 under the Linux Foundation, is an attempt to fix that. It draws on FinOps principles and aims to produce open benchmarks and best practices across token production, consumption, and AI value management. SHI International, a $16 billion technology solutions provider serving more than 17,000 organisations globally, announced today it has become a founding member.
For SHI, the move is a natural extension of existing commitments. The company is a Premier member of the FinOps Foundation, also hosted by the Linux Foundation, and has built practices around IT Asset Management and financial governance for technology investments. Shane Cronin, Head of FinOps and ITAM Services at SHI, said the Foundation fills a gap between AI adoption and the governance disciplines that make adoption durable.
J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the Tokenomics Foundation, said SHI brings practitioner depth that community-built standards need: SHI's involvement in the FinOps Foundation, the ITAM Forum, and now Tokenomics gives it a cross-discipline perspective few technology providers can match.
SHI will collaborate with other founding members to develop frameworks organisations can use to evaluate AI investments with the same rigour applied to software licensing or cloud spend. The Foundation is open and community-led, meaning the frameworks it produces will not be proprietary to any single vendor.
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