IBM Apptio offers new tools to track AI and hybrid cloud costs

IBM Apptio's new AI tracking tool helps firms monitor costs, usage, and business impact—offering a way to measure what's working and what's not.

Many companies are pouring money into AI and hybrid cloud, but they're struggling to track what they're getting in return. A recent IBM study shows just one in four CEOs think their AI investments have delivered the expected value. With cloud costs rising and AI tools spreading across departments, having a clear view of where money is going—and what it's producing—is becoming a must.

IBM-owned Apptio has released two tools aimed at giving businesses that clarity: AI TCO & Usage and Hybrid IT TCO Impact. Both are designed to help teams understand costs, make smarter decisions, and avoid waste as they scale their AI and hybrid IT strategies.

IBM Apptio’s family of software products, includes Apptio One, Apptio Cloudability, and Apptio Targetprocess, designed to help organizations manage technology spend, optimize cloud resources, and plan agile investments. It's a platform that empowers IT leaders to make informed decisions by providing insights into technology spend and its alignment with business outcomes.

The AI TCO & Usage tool gives users a way to follow AI spending and track its business value. It offers a breakdown of where money is going—cloud providers, vendors, internal teams—and highlights how much each project is being used. It also helps identify when spending is rising without results. With this kind of visibility, teams can decide which tools to keep, which to scale, and which to drop.

This is especially important as more businesses use AI in different parts of the company. Without clear tracking, costs can spiral. The tool also lets teams assess the cost per unit of output, making it easier to explain how AI is being used and whether it's paying off.

Hybrid IT TCO Impact, meanwhile, is built for companies running a mix of cloud and on-premises systems. It lets finance and tech teams see how moving an app from one setup to another—say from a private cloud to a public one—affects the bottom line. The tool gives a clear view of what each app costs to run, where costs shift during a move, and what return companies are seeing from those changes.

Instead of flipping between dashboards or teams to piece together data, users can see everything in one place. That includes spend across all types of infrastructure, how far along a migration is, and whether it's meeting financial goals.

Jevin Jensen, an analyst at IDC, says these kinds of tools are becoming necessary as cloud systems grow more complex and AI investments keep rising. "TCO features are needed across both public and hybrid clouds to stay on top of the constant changes and plan more proactively," he said.

Eugene Khvostov, Apptio's Chief Product Officer, added that many companies don't have the tools to show how AI and hybrid IT spending connects to business value. "AI TCO & Usage is designed to solve the AI ROI dilemma," he said. "And we developed Hybrid IT TCO Impact to support better decision-making across the hybrid cloud."

With companies under pressure to make every tech dollar count, especially as AI expands, tools like these may help them get better control of where their money is going—and whether it's worth it.