IBM Apptio helps CFOs connect AI spend to business value

Dive Brief:

• Apptio, an IBM company, announced Thursday that a new tool designed to help organizations measure the business impact of artificial intelligence investments is entering the “public preview” stage after a pilot with select customers.
• The software vendor said its latest offering connects each AI initiative to one or more business outcomes and “customer-selected proof metrics,” such as cycle time, cost avoided, conversion rate or incident volume. Results can be tracked over time to show whether value is being realized and what action may be needed, the company said.
• “Business leaders are continuing to increase their investments in AI, yet small percentages of them are able to demonstrably measure the benefit of those investments,” Bill Lobig, vice president of IBM Apptio, said in an interview. “That’s what we’re solving for.”

Dive Insight:

The announcement comes as corporate AI budgets face increased scrutiny, with companies grappling with rising usage costs and growing demands to demonstrate that investments are producing measurable returns.

“Tokenmaxxing” — the practice of aggressively maximizing AI usage within an organization — has become a focal point in the debate.

Last spring, Uber Technologies was in the news after CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga disclosed the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget within the first four months of the year, driven by rapid adoption of tools such as Claude Code across engineering teams.

On the heels of those reports, Uber Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald appeared in a Rapid Response podcast interview, where he indicated it was hard to show that rising AI token usage was delivering a return on investment.

In an Aug. 5 post on X, Naga indicated that Uber was now seeing AI costs decline after measures such as prompt caching, optimizing model settings, and giving engineers real-time visibility into their AI usage and costs per hour were implemented.

“I think it’s another signal that we’re coming to the end of the so-called ‘tokenmaxxing’ era,” he said.

His comments came just after Uber’s second-quarter earnings call, during which CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy reported the company was seeing “near 100%” adoption of AI-based coding tools among its engineers, with a doubling in the code output per user.

“There is a lot more nuance to this, and we are being quite smart internally on how we are measuring this and not getting ahead of our skis,” he said.

Uber’s experience highlights a broader challenge confronting CFOs across enterprises.

“Companies are pouring money into AI, and they don’t always know what they’re getting out of it,” Lobig said.

Apptio’s latest rollout builds on prior efforts by the company to bring greater financial discipline to technology spending.

“Up until now, we’ve been focused on what I’ll call cost visibility — showing you who’s spending what, why,” Lobig said. “Now we’re adding ROI — the other half of the equation.”

The new tool, dubbed IBM Apptio AI Value & ROI, “centralizes AI initiatives and tracks metrics across revenue, cost, speed, productivity and risk, connecting AI investments to measurable business outcomes,” according to a press release.

The public preview period will allow further feedback before the tool becomes generally available later this quarter, Lobig said, emphasizing the need to ensure accuracy and reliability.

People are relying on the platform to “make critical business decisions,” he said. “It can’t be wrong.”