At a Glance

  • IBM subsidiary Apptio announced on Thursday that a tool designed to help organizationsmeasure the business impact of AI investmentsis now in "public preview" after a pilot with select customers.
  • The software vendor said its latest offering links each AI initiative to one or more business outcomes and "customer-selected proof metrics," such as cycle time, cost avoidance, conversion rate, or incident volume. Results can be tracked over time to show whether value has been realized and what actions may be needed, the company said.
  • "Business leaders continue to increase their investments in AI, but only a small percentage of them are actually able to measure the benefits of those investments," IBM Apptio Vice President Bill Lobig said in an interview. "That's the problem we're solving."

Deep Dive

The announcement comes as enterprise AI budgets face increased scrutiny, with companies dealing with rising usage costs and growing demands to prove that investments yield measurable returns.

"Tokenmaxxing" — the practice of aggressively maximizing AI usage within an organization — has become a focal point of this discussion.

Last spring, Uber Technologies made headlines when CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga disclosed that the company had exhausted itsentire 2026 AI coding budgetwithin the first four months of the year, driven by rapid adoption of tools like Claude Code by engineering teams.

Following those reports, Uber Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald said in a Rapid Response podcast interview that it was difficult to prove that rising AI token usage was deliveringreturn on investment。

In a post on X dated August 5, Naga said that after implementing measures such as prompt caching, optimizing model settings, and giving engineers real-time visibility into their AI usage and hourly costs, Uber's AI costs weredeclining。

"I think this is another signal that we're heading toward the end of the era of so-called 'tokenmaxxing,'" he said.

His comments came just after Uber's second-quarter earnings call, during which CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy reported that adoption of AI coding tools among the company's engineers was "close to 100%," and that per-usercode output had doubled。

"There's a lot of nuance here, and we're being very thoughtful in how we measure this internally, not rushing ahead," he said.

Uber's experience highlights the broader challenge facing CFOs at enterprises.

"Companies are pouring a lot of money into AI, but it's not always clear what they're getting out of it," Lobig said.

Apptio's latest release builds on the company's earlier efforts to bring stronger financial discipline to technology spending.

"So far, we've focused on what's called cost visibility — showing who is spending what and why," Lobig said. "Now we're adding ROI — that's the other half of the equation."

The new tool, called 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 company said the tool is now available in public preview to all IBM Apptio Costing Standard or IBM Apptio AI TCO & Usage customers.

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

People rely on the company's software to "make critical business decisions," he said. "It can't be wrong."