IT leaders need to invest in AI – could ITAM and FinOps be the solution?

Artificial intelligence will be the top investment area for CIOs in 2024. IT leaders see in generative AI an opportunity to accelerate innovation, improve employee productivity, and gain a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, investing in AI is not cheap. CIOs will need to find a significant budget to make traction in their AI roadmap, but good IT asset management (ITAM) and FinOps may help them find those dollars.

Snow Software recently released its 2024 IT Priorities Report, an annual poll of more than 800 global IT leaders to understand their priorities and challenges for the coming year. Given all the hype surrounding AI in 2023, it was no surprise that integrating AI into their business operations was listed as the top priority for IT leaders (35%) going into 2024, followed by reducing IT costs (28%) and reducing security risks (28%).

Between these three priorities, the unspoken challenge for CIOs becomes: how do you find the budget for competing initiatives?

This conundrum is mirrored in the delicate budget balance every CIO faces: money is needed to run the business, grow the business, and secure the business. The budget for daily operations to run the business must be reduced to meet new demands for innovation to grow the business, and the dollars for growth must be balanced with the increasing budgetary needs tied to securing the business.

As catalogued in the IT Priorities Report, 82% of IT leaders stated they were completely prepared to leverage generative AI, with 62% already seeing increased investment in tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard. But 21% say they are already overspending on generative AI tools. Additionally, 89% of leaders surveyed admitted their employees would need to improve their skillsets to best leverage AI capabilities.

In summary, innovation in AI is going to require significant investment for enterprises to get it off the ground. Whether it’s building new products leveraging AI, rearchitecting data models, investing in employee training, recruiting new hires, or upgrading to premium software licenses (in the vein of Microsoft Copilot, only available for Microsoft’s top-tier license), IT innovation budgets need to increase to support AI development.

So where are organizations going to find the budget to balance these competing priorities?

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