Erik Peterson is the Founder, CTO, and CISO of CloudZero, the financial control plane for cloud and AI spend. He built CloudZero on a simple thesis: every engineering decision is a buying decision, and most companies don't have the governance to see it, let alone know whether it paid off. Cost data alone was never the point; knowing the return on every dollar is. As AI has pushed that problem into inference, developer tooling, and autonomous agents, Erik has spent the past year extending the thesis into what he calls "cost-per-anything," the ability to calculate the cost, and the ROI, of any unit of value, across cloud and AI, for humans and the agents they deploy.

Erik has been building and securing cloud software since the cloud's arrival, and is a frequent speaker on AI cost governance, ROI, cloud economics, and security. He sits on the FinOps Foundation Governing Board, is an AWS Ambassador, and in 2026 delivered talks at QCon AI Boston and FinOps X.

Previous to CloudZero, Erik was Director of Technology Strategy for Veracode, where he led Veracode's migration to the public cloud, and has nearly three decades of software industry experience, including senior leadership and technology roles for HP, SPI Dynamics, GuardedNet, and Sanctum.

Erik has also held IT & InfoSec roles at Moody's, SunTrust Bank, U.S. Embassy Vienna, Austria, and the United Nations, where he supported the technology needs of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikpeterson/ Website: http://www.erikpeterson.com X: @silvexis