IBM launches Apptio AI tool to track ROI of spending

IBM has launched a public preview of Apptio AI Value & ROI, a tool designed to show businesses how AI spending relates to business results.

The product gives technology and finance teams a single view of AI costs, including token spending, and links those costs to measures such as revenue, cost, speed, productivity and risk. It is available in public preview for customers using Apptio Costing Standard or Apptio AI TCO & Usage.

The launch comes as companies face growing pressure to justify investment in generative AI and other AI systems. Many have expanded pilots and deployments, but finance teams still struggle to show whether those projects produce measurable returns.

IBM cited Gartner research showing that 84% of finance leaders have not been able to measure the return on investment of AI initiatives. The finding points to a broader problem for businesses trying to move from experimentation to tighter financial oversight of AI programmes.

Apptio AI Value & ROI brings together data on AI initiatives in one place and lets users connect each project to defined business outcomes. Those outcomes can be matched with customer-selected proof metrics, including cycle time, cost avoided, conversion rate and incident volume.

Users can then track baseline, target, actual and realised results over time. This structure is intended to help organisations decide whether an AI initiative is delivering value or whether further action is needed.

Cost tracking

A central element of the new offering is its use of existing IBM tools to build a fuller cost picture. IBM Cloudability provides visibility and attribution of token spend, while Apptio AI TCO & Usage contributes modelled data on technology, usage, labour and other costs linked to AI projects.

By combining those figures with business outcome data, IBM aims to give finance and technology executives a way to assess not only how much AI is costing, but also what those investments are producing. The issue has become more prominent as usage-based charging models, especially token-based pricing for large language models, add complexity to budgeting and forecasting.

The software also supports multiple inventory and metric sources, which can be used across a range of AI initiatives. That flexibility may appeal to larger organisations running several projects across departments, where the cost of models, infrastructure and staff can be spread across different budgets.

The wider aim is to close what IBM describes as a gap between AI investment and accountability. For many companies, the problem is not simply that AI spending is rising, but that costs are often fragmented across cloud services, software tools and internal teams, making direct comparison with outcomes difficult.

Bill Lobig, Vice President, IBM Apptio, outlined the company's view of the problem.

"AI is facing a cost crisis, and organisations are under growing pressure to demonstrate business value," said Bill Lobig, Vice President, IBM Apptio. "With Apptio, clients can address waste - with one client seeing a 50% reduction in costs, allowing them to unlock funding for new AI initiatives that accelerate innovation."

IBM is positioning the product at the intersection of technology management and finance governance, where companies are trying to bring AI spending under the same discipline already applied to cloud infrastructure and software estates. Apptio has long focused on technology business management, and the new tool extends that approach into AI budgeting and performance measurement.

Broader pressure

For large organisations, the challenge is no longer limited to adopting AI tools. Boards and senior executives increasingly want evidence that investment in models, applications and related services can be tied to gains in efficiency, sales, service quality or risk reduction.

That demand has created a market for software that can map technical consumption data to financial outcomes. In practice, measuring AI return remains difficult because many projects deliver indirect benefits, take time to scale, or depend on changes to business processes rather than software deployment alone.

Apptio AI Value & ROI is intended to provide a governed and repeatable way to evaluate those efforts. Broader general availability is due in the third quarter of 2026.

The public preview is open to all customers of Apptio Costing Standard or Apptio AI TCO & Usage.