While organisations look at leveraging AI and hybrid architecture to scale and transform their capabilities, showing that they can deliver business value can be complex and difficult. For many technology leaders, proving value, not just controlling costs, is becoming the primary mandate.
On the ground, IBM Apptio says the majority of FinOps teams in the region still primarily rely on cloud-native tools for cost management, which leaves significant blind spots across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Studies have found that many enterprises are still using outdated planning and budgeting processes that weren't built for the way cloud and AI actually work.
This uncertainty about returns can hamper progress and growth.
How essential is the need now for FinOps maturity to manage cloud costs and support innovation?
To discuss how this issue is becoming critical as companies rush to scale AI, iTNews Asia speaks with Pete Wilson, Vice President and General Manager, IBM Apptio Business APAC.
He also shares his insights on how teams in our region move faster with clearer financial boundaries.
iTNews Asia: How important is measuring outcomes, connecting technology spend -increasingly in hybrid, multi cloud and AI transformation - to business outcomes?
Wilson: Technology leaders today are under growing pressure to explain not just how much they are spending, but why that spending makes sense in business terms. For example, IT often uses cost reduction whereas Finance and Business leaders will often use revenue.
When justifying investments in Cloud I personally would use cost reduction, but if it regards justifying investment in AI, I would instead use a business process improvement metric.
However, if I had to settle on one single metric across IT, Finance and Business for Cloud and AI investment, I would choose the ongoing operating cost of the cloud/AI solution in question.
While technology budgets continue to rise, particularly as organisations invest in areas such as cloud modernisation, cybersecurity, and AI, most organisations can see where money is being spent across infrastructure, cloud platforms, software portfolios, and AI initiatives.
iTNews Asia: What are the gaps that exist today?
Wilson: The gaps lie in two key areas.
First is clearly understanding who is consuming the technology across the organisation. Second is connecting that spend to business outcomes and value.
As technology environments become more complex and distributed, leaders often struggle to clearly articulate how investment supports operational improvement, service delivery, or strategic objectives.
iTNews Asia: Do you see many cases where inaccurate forecasting has led to significant budget overruns in organisations, particularly during digital transformation projects?
Wilson: Challenges around forecasting tend to surface once organisations begin operating cloud-based and AI-driven environments at scale. Our recent 2026 global Technology Investment Management report shows that about half of respondents report low confidence in cloud spend forecasting, highlighting how difficult it remains for organisations to predict how costs will evolve as usage and demand change. Over the past 12 months we have seen significant cost increases and overruns driven by AI investments.
This challenge is especially evident within FinOps teams responsible for managing emerging workloads. Among respondents who are working in FinOps roles, only 13 percent reveal that they have fully allocated AI and machine-learning cloud costs back to the business and surfaced optimisation insights. The remaining teams are either still exploring AI cost management or allocating costs without optimisation visibility.
iTNews Asia: What happens when budgets overrun? What must they change?
Wilson: When forecasting accuracy is limited, overruns become harder to avoid. As spending deviates from expectations, leaders are forced to focus on reconciling variance rather than directing investment.
When tracking a digital transformation budget, you should be splitting and monitoring costs across public cloud, AI vendors and labour. Weekly, if not, daily tracking of your public cloud spend will show early signs of cost growth driven by the growth of AI usage in your organisation.
What needs to change is the ability to forecast and manage spending as it evolves. In environments where costs are driven by consumption and scale, the report makes clear that visibility and allocation alone are not sufficient
iTNews Asia: Why are enterprises still using outdated planning and budgeting processes that weren't built for the way cloud and AI actually work today? Is this because of cost, resistance to change from tradition, or a lack of awareness?
Wilson: At the root of these issues is the continued reliance on planning and budgeting models that were designed for more stable, traditional asset-based technology environments.
We found that almost half of organisations primarily use ERP systems to manage IT spend and budgets, while only 7 percent rely on spreadsheets or other manual processes. By contrast, about a third are using purpose-built IT financial management platforms, highlighting how deeply traditional planning approaches remain embedded.
Organisations are still adapting to faster planning cycles that public cloud and AI are driving. ERP platforms run a traditional CAPEX planning cycle. The forcing function for change is the increasing pressure on IT and Finance to do more with the same investment - drive down “Run” costs to enable funding of “Growth” initiatives.
iTNews Asia: How detrimental will be the impact if organisations do not or fail to adapt to the rapid changes and complexities of their new tech environment?
Wilson: Growth of overall business performance relative to market peers is often an early sign of slower decisions or underinvestment in innovation. Decision-making slows as leaders become less confident that the numbers in front of them reflect current conditions. Moving funding between priorities becomes more difficult, particularly when budgets are tightly bound to annual plans.
Uncertainty around value continues to influence how investment decisions are made, leading organisations to become more cautious over time. Approvals take longer, governance layers increase, and innovation becomes harder to sustain as organisations prioritise control over momentum.
The result is that overall technology spend may continue to rise, but its effectiveness declines. Organisations are investing more, but yet struggle to translate that investment into business outcomes and value that are clearly understood, measured, and defended at the executive level.
iTNews Asia: Could you explain why the biggest barriers to scaling cloud and AI aren't because of a lack of tools, but because of how costs are governed and allocated internally across the business.
Wilson: Most organisations are no longer struggling to adopt cloud or AI technologies. In fact, our recent report shows that nine out of 10 of leaders rank AI as a priority investment area, and cloud services also remain among the most closely watched categories of spend. The challenge emerges as these technologies move beyond experimentation and into broader, enterprise-wide deployment.
The difficulty lies in how costs are governed and allocated as environments scale. While many organisations rate their FinOps maturity as established or higher, only a small number – about one in 10 organisations – have achieved full chargeback for cloud costs. This gap highlights how accountability often lags adoption, particularly when usage spans multiple teams, platforms, and business units.
Often, we still see the frequency of the charge as the issue i.e. it is quarterly or even 6 monthly charge cycles. To drive true accountability of costs – Cloud or AI or both – you must charge on a monthly basis with a completely digital based bill i.e. the business
consumer not only see what they are charged but they can fully self-serve on the full details of the charge, including units consumed and price per unit. This then provides 100 percent transparency into a business lines IT consumption and costs.
As cloud and AI workloads grow, costs increasingly sit across shared services and hybrid environments. While leaders can see that costs are rising, they struggle to explain which workloads, applications, or decisions are driving those increases, or how they relate to business outcomes and value.
Without clear governance and allocation, optimisation becomes reactive rather than deliberate. This makes it harder to scale cloud and AI with confidence.
iTNews Asia: Why do you think confidence in IT financial management often outpacing actual capability?
Wilson: A persistent mismatch exists between how confident organisations feel about their IT financial management and how well their processes perform under real-world complexity. Nearly three in five IT financial management professionals believe their forecasts are highly accurate, yet only about a third actually use purpose-built tools to manage and validate technology spend.
That gap becomes more problematic as environments grow more complex. Cloud, hybrid infrastructure, and AI workloads evolve too quickly for disconnected systems and manual processes to keep pace. While visibility into spend may exist, it is often fragmented across tools and teams.
Data, especially IT data can and will always be fragmented across the various IT and Finance operational systems, but those with a dedicated ITFM solution bring that data together on a monthly basis to provide a single pane of glass for transparency. It is this level of transparency that gives those leaders confidence in their forecasts. Those leaders who do not have a dedicated ITFM solution should focus on this as the first step to closing their confidence gap.
iTNews Asia: What can leaders do to close the gap?
Wilson: Closing this gap requires strengthening foundational capabilities. Integrated, accurate data that is normalised and contextualised across finance, IT, and the business enables leaders to justify spend, align priorities, and act earlier.
Business leaders need to do more in tying investment spend to business value. Understanding the total cost of an investment and measuring that to business value will help them to choose the right innovation that will deliver the best results.
The hardest struggle today is clearly when CIO and CFO do not have this level of transparency leading to “best guesses” of what and where to invest.
iTNews Asia: How can organisations embrace modern planning in their digital transformation? How can they balance between cost, innovation and business value?
Wilson: Business leaders need to do more in tying investment spend to business value. Understanding the total cost of an investment and measuring that to business value will help them to choose the right innovation that will deliver the best results. The hardest struggle today is clearly when CIO and CFO do not have this level of transparency leading to “best guesses” of what and where to invest.
Organisations that are making progress increasingly recognise that technology investment now comes with a dual mandate: to continue investing in priority areas such as AI and cybersecurity, while simultaneously exercising stronger financial discipline and ensuring you can demonstrate the business outcomes and value of that investment.
Cybersecurity and AI remain top investment focus for leaders today, yet these same areas are among the most cost-sensitive. Their other concerns include closely monitor cybersecurity costs, cloud cost volatility, and rising AI and machine-learning costs.
- Pete Wilson, Vice President and General Manager, IBM Apptio Business APAC.
Managing this reality begins with addressing gaps in core IT financial management capabilities. Our latest report shows that alignment, visibility, and forecasting remain unresolved challenges for many teams, even as budgets grow.
Without consistent cost transparency and forecast accuracy, technology leaders struggle to make informed trade-offs across increasingly complex portfolios that span cloud, hybrid infrastructure, and AI workloads.
Planning practices also need to reflect how technology spend behaves in practice. Rigid annual cycles are poorly matched to environments where costs fluctuate and funding is frequently reallocated. Two out of three organisations we polled are funding initiatives primarily from existing budgets rather than new investment, increasing pressure to reprioritise continuously rather than plan once a year.
Finally, progress depends on reducing fragmentation between financial and operational decision-making. The data points to growing complexity across IT financial management, cloud cost management, and portfolio planning.
Organisations that unify cost, usage, and delivery insights place themselves in a stronger position to reallocate funds, manage volatility, and focus investment on initiatives that demonstrate measurable impact on business outcomes and value.
Ultimately, this is about restoring decision confidence. When leaders can clearly explain where technology spend is concentrated, how it is changing, which priorities it supports, and the business outcomes and value it creates.
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