Dive Brief:

• Apptio, an IBM company, has expanded its technology business management suite with a new tool designed to help organizations control their artificial intelligence spending, according to a recent announcement.
• The “AI TCO [Total Cost of Ownership] and Usage” tool enables enterprises to continuously monitor AI initiatives across their full lifecycle, providing visibility into not only costs and usage, but also return on investment considerations, the company said.
• “This new solution helps to bring in all the different components that contribute to AI total cost of ownership, including your labor, infrastructure and software stack costs,” Jenny Fong, vice president of product marketing at Apptio, said in an interview. “This is really going to help organizations get ahead of AI sprawl.”

Dive Insight:

Apptio’s new tool, announced June 5, joins an expanding portfolio of technology business management and FinOps offerings.

In its latest rollout, the company also introduced a product designed to provide companies with a mix of both traditional on-premises and cloud-based software resources gain visibility into financial impacts of application migrations. The Hybrid IT TCO Impact tool provides a “dedicated financial view into application migrations, tracking cost shifts and ROI across the hybrid IT landscape,” according to a press release.

Global IT spending is expected to total $5.61 trillion in 2025, a 9.8% increase compared with 2024, Gartner projected in January. However, President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements have since injected uncertainty into the IT market, according to IDC analysts.

In a Boston Consulting Group survey conducted in April, 44% of IT leaders said their organization had deferred discretionary tech projects in the wake of the president’s tariff announcements, according to results released last month.

“The one bright spot in IT leaders’ plans is their ongoing commitment to AI,” BCG said in a report on the findings. “Despite the current uncertainty, fully half say that they plan to expand their supplier base for this key technology in the near term.”

While AI investment has become a strategic priority in recent years, CEOs say that only 25% of such initiatives have delivered the expected ROI, according to a May IBM report. Sixty-four percent of surveyed chief executives acknowledged that the risk of falling behind drives investment in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization.

Apptio’s AI TCO product can assist organizations with evaluating whether AI initiatives are incurring costs without corresponding business value or usage, according to Fong.

She said it can also help provide visibility into whether some business units are consuming AI resources more than others, or whether a team is paying for a new AI application that has not been reviewed by IT or one that duplicates a tool that is already being used elsewhere in the organization.

Prior to the latest rollout, Apptio customers could track technology and cloud costs at a high level, but with the recent surge in AI adoption and usage, the company saw greater need for a dedicated tool to not only track AI costs but correlate them with business outcomes, ROI and adoption, Fong said.

“It’s about addressing a pervasive and growing concern for most organizations in a simple, straightforward manner that saves the time, effort and resources it would take to build this themselves,” she said.