Controlling the Costs of AI Success: Inside an Azure Scale-Up

How TeraSky and Microsoft helped a fast-growing AI platform align cloud spend with customer traction.

The Background

For a rapidly expanding AI company, skyrocketing cloud consumption wasn’t necessarily a red flag. This time, it was tangible proof of market traction.
The company is an AI-native discovery platform purpose-built for criminal defense attorneys. As adoption of the platform by law firms and legal teams surged, its Azure utilization surged along with it. While booming demand was a clear win for the sales team, it created an urgent challenge for engineering and management: scale the infrastructure, or risk cloud costs getting out of control.

The Challenge

The company’s platform processes a complex mix of text, audio, images, and video. Because these media types require massive, unpredictable amounts of computing power, the company needed to understand what was driving Azure consumption, ensure the architecture could scale efficiently, and build a predictive model to inform future capacity decisions.
Recognizing the need for a holistic approach, the legaltech provider AI partnered with TeraSky and Microsoft to execute a targeted, three-track transformation focused on executive alignment, technical optimization, and FinOps maturity, linking Azure spend to customer growth while ensuring the platform remained fast and stable.

The Solution

To keep things moving quickly, TeraSky and Microsoft split the work into three parallel tracks. Running business, technical, and financial tracking simultaneously ensured that infrastructure changes always aligned with leadership’s broader business goals.

1. Executive and Strategic Alignment
   The teams created direct cloud cost reporting for the client’s leadership team, including the CEO. Instead of sharing confusing rows of raw data, the partners translated the Azure invoices into a business narrative, mapping cloud spend to new customer sign-ups and Azure services usage.
   This allowed leadership to understand and manage rising cloud costs amid business growth. The teams also helped the company evaluate Azure commercial options that fit its growth stage without locking the company into premature long-term commitments.
2. Technical Infrastructure Optimization
   The technical track ensured the client’s Azure environment could smoothly handle future product growth. TeraSky and Microsoft reviewed the existing setup and made targeted improvements to the platform’s database architecture, server choices, and storage settings.
   The teams also helped the business make better use of the built-in Azure AI services included in their subscription, ensuring their development team was getting the most out of the cloud tools they were already paying for.
3. Practical FinOps and Cost Tracking
   This track introduced a daily culture of financial accountability. The teams set up clear cost dashboards, real-time alerts for unexpected spending spikes, and automated rules to turn off or downsize unused resources.
   Crucially, this data gave the company the confidence to buy Azure Savings Plans. These plans successfully cut daily server costs while keeping the flexibility the team needed to scale up as new customers joined.

The Impact

The success of the project is clear in the numbers: over twelve months, the client’s monthly Azure spend grew from $55,000 in May 2025 to $151,000 in May 2026. This 174% increase was entirely driven by new customers and higher platform usage, not by wasteful or unmanaged infrastructure.
As the company’s Head of Engineering shared, “TeraSky and Microsoft helped us connect Azure consumption to the business growth behind it. We gained clearer visibility, a stronger technical foundation, and a more structured way to plan future cloud commitments as the platform scales.”
Ultimately, the engagement established the financial guardrails and technical stability the AI platform needed to sustain its momentum, providing a resilient cloud foundation for sustained commercial traction.