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Ben DeBow is the founder and CEO of Fortified, a workload intelligence company twice named to the Inc. 5000, and the author of End of Abundance in Tech (Forbes Books, 2023). For more than two decades, he has worked inside the engine room of enterprise data infrastructure, and what he found there is both alarming and actionable. Most organizations have never seen their true technology cost. Not the cloud invoice. The real cost: the inefficient queries, the bloated workloads, the decades of technical debt compounding like interest on a loan no one knew they’d taken out.

Through WISdom, Fortified’s FinOps for Data platform for databases, DeBow has built a discipline that bridges FinOps and engineering, giving organizations cost visibility at the code level, not just the dashboard. His technology health framework has helped large enterprises recover meaningful, measurable technology spend.

As agentic AI reshapes how organizations operate, DeBow argues that the efficiency era has become existential: companies deploying autonomous systems on unresolved technical debt aren’t innovating, they’re compounding their liability. He speaks and writes on AI governance, FinOps, and the strategic implications of the efficiency era for boards and executive leadership teams. Ben hosts the Tech(e)valuation podcast and writes on Forbes.com as a Forbes Books author. He is based in Charlotte, NC.