AI investments have become a strategic priority for business with the mindset that if you're not using AI, you're falling behind. But according to recent IBM research, only 25% of CEOs say their initiatives delivered the expected ROI over recent years. The lack of expected ROI has caused widespread unease about large investments in AI. Despite recognition that the companies that don’t invest in AI will lag, 73% of surveyed organisations in the same IBM CEO study are embracing hybrid cloud to support AI deployments, making demonstrable ROI even more critical.

This is why implementing tools that help measure and quantify AI and hybrid-cloud investment has never been more important, and why Apptio has released two new features as part of its IT Financial Management solutions — AI TCO & Usage and Hybrid IT TCO Impact.

These are designed to empower enterprises to take control of their hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to ultimately help drive increased ROI from AI and hybrid IT investments.

Increasing visibility to measure AI value

The key to successfully implementing AI is data and visibility — getting granular insights into spend, such as identifying cost drivers across cloud, vendor and labour, and monitoring AI TCO trends and anomalies to empower teams to optimise costs effectively. Tracking total cost and business impact across AI initiatives helps organisations optimise spend, measure outcomes and scale up. With increased visibility, business leaders can make more informed investment decisions, enable solution adoption and maximise the impact of AI across the organisation. This is exactly what AI TCO & Usage offers.

AI TCO & Usage enables organisations to monitor the lifecycle of AI investments, providing defensible transparency into ongoing AI costs and usage across AI models and solutions. This helps business leaders reduce waste and improve efficiency across teams, and ultimately helps leaders justify investment and improve operational outcomes.

Hybrid cloud: bringing the pieces together

Hybrid IT TCO helps enterprises demonstrate the financial impact of application migrations across their evolving hybrid IT landscape by enabling active tracking of migration progress, helping to align with broader cloud business and financial goals, and supporting organisations with their AI investment.

FinOps teams are increasingly collaborating with IT Financial Management and Technology Business Management teams to obtain deeper visibility into investments and minimise the risks of ballooning costs and wasted resources within their hybrid IT environment. When mass adoption of cloud first happened in the early 2010s, the costs quickly spiralled out of control for many, leaving them burned by big cloud investments that failed to deliver return on investment.

Beyond simply tracking migration, Hybrid IT TCO offers a financial view into application migrations, tracking cost shifts and ROI across the hybrid IT landscape. Gartner predicts 70% of workloads will still run in the cloud by 2028, but with a crucial caveat: Multinational organisations will also need a digital sovereignty strategy in place.

Informed by the data offered by Hybrid IT TCO, organisations can balance costs across cloud and on-prem infrastructure, better implement their digital sovereignty strategies, and avoid the spiralling costs that darkened the first implementation of the cloud. Further, it unifies on-prem, private cloud, and public cloud footprints into a single view, delivering visibility into the hybrid IT estate.

Why now is the time to act

As AI development and implementation accelerate, ensuring organisations have the financial foundations rights is crucial to ensure that costs don’t spiral and underutilised resources aren’t left operating. These solutions are tailored to address some of the industry’s pressing needs, including IT cost transparency and demonstrating value, ultimately filling gaps for organisations and enabling the agility to stay on top of a constantly shifting cloud and AI landscape.