Optimising IT costs is now the top priority for IT teams, according to Ivanti’s 2025 Technology at Work Report. Our survey found that cost optimisation was cited as a critical strategic goal for 2025, outranking improving cybersecurity, investing in infrastructure and deploying AI / ML technology.

However, despite many organisations viewing AI and automation in terms of short-term operational improvements, many organisations haven’t yet tapped into AI’s full potential to transform how IT manages, predicts and optimises costs.

It’s clear that IT teams are already bullish on AI’s value in everyday operations. IT is currently leading the charge in AI implementation, with 36% of IT teams using generative AI, according to McKinsey research from March 2025 — more than any other function.

While IT teams regularly use AI for coding, support tickets and other day-to-day work, many organisations don’t see beyond these short-term efficiency gains. Too often IT leaders overlook AI’s untapped potential for enterprise-wide optimisation.

This shift from incremental productivity gains to strategic cost optimisation frees resources and grants IT leaders the flexibility to focus on innovation, long-term transformation and consistent alignment of operations with fast-evolving business strategy.

With CIOs under mounting pressure to “do more with less,” AI-driven IT cost optimisation has the power to reduce wasteful IT spending, justify investments and deliver strategic value across the entire organisation.

However, before this transformation can happen, companies must first understand the biggest sources of inefficient spending and identify the most valuable areas where they can use AI capabilities to better allocate resources and make the most of their IT budget.

Major barriers to IT cost optimisation

Cost management challenges are systemic. Inefficient IT spending results from compounding breakdowns across systems, processes and leadership structures. More than half of IT professionals said that wasteful IT spending was a significant problem at their organisation, according to 2025 Ivanti research.

Wasteful IT spend is especially egregious in high-complexity sectors like telecoms and government, where legacy systems and sprawling vendor relationships make it difficult to track and control spend. These sectors face greater pressure to cut costs, as unchecked waste limits their ability to fund strategic initiatives and modernise critical infrastructure.

Monthly vendor reviews, quarterly budget reconciliations and annual contract negotiations struggle to keep pace with today’s dynamic IT landscape. Organisational cloud spend can spike overnight, and tech complexity compounds rapidly due to decentralised procurement, shadow IT and poor asset visibility. For instance, 38% of IT professionals Ivanti surveyed pointed to “tech complexity” as a major barrier to effective IT operations.

Looking toward the future of AI-powered ITOps, many IT professionals recognise AI’s transformative potential to meet these challenges and eliminate unnecessary spending.

AI and machine learning for predictive cost management

Manual cost reviews alone are backward-looking, labor-intensive and prone to human error. Human oversight alone cannot recognise and analyse patterns that emerge through large-scale AI data analysis. AI-powered cost management flips the script. Instead of reporting overspending after it happens, AI predictive analysis can detect potential anomalies and provide organisations with accurate budget forecasting to avoid redundant, unnecessary spending. AI can also surface redundant tools, highlight lifecycle costs and flag spending anomalies that human reviews would likely miss.

Consider this scenario: you can use AI to analyse your IT asset management data to uncover shelfware and unused software licenses, or to mine support tickets for patterns showing when certain device types typically begin to fail. Those insights can inform smarter replacement cycles, reduce downtime and ensure you only pay for what you actually use.

The speed difference is dramatic. Organisations using AI-driven cost optimisation are seeing measurable reductions in operational expenses, while others are still compiling last quarter’s reports on spreadsheets.

Real-time visibility consistently outperforms reactive reviews. When you can predict and prevent waste instead of just documenting it, that’s when IT shifts from expense management to strategic value creation.

AI cloud cost management and resource management

Cloud environments are the single largest source of budget variance and waste. Nearly nine in 10 (88%) of organisations see significant variance between actual spend and forecasted spend, and only 30% know where their cloud budget is going, according to CloudZero’s State of Cloud Costs in 2024.

Ivanti’s own findings expand on these IT resource management challenges:

• 39% of IT professionals cited outdated hardware as a considerable source of wasteful spend.
• Outdated, unused and expired software is also a major factor, with nearly one in three (31%) IT professionals reporting their organisations don’t track unused or underused software licenses.
• Even more concerning, 48% of IT teams reported that their companies use software that’s reached end of life (EOL).

The combination of multi-cloud environments, unpredictable usage over time, complex and multilateral pricing within the same services and drastically varied costs makes the need for AI and automation clear.

AI-enabled technology can help cut through this complexity. AI solutions can proactively identify underutilised software licenses, over-provisioned cloud resources and redundant applications across environments that’d take human analysts weeks to map.

What’s more, AI combined with ITSM automation can suggest resolutions to inefficient IT spending through intelligent recommendations for rightsising and deprovisioning. Leading CIOs use strategic IT cost management to fund high-impact initiatives, and AI automation makes this achievable at scale.

Software license optimisation delivers significant returns. AI tracks actual software usage against entitlements, identifies downgrade opportunities and predicts future needs based on growth patterns. Organisations pay for what they use, not what they purchased months ago.

AI’s impact on streamlining IT processes

While AI adoption increases among IT teams, its cost optimisation impacts aren’t yet as widespread as basic use cases like predictive maintenance and automating routine self-service tasks — both popular, according to Ivanti research.

Delayed widespread AI adoption in ITOps prevents organisations from reaping the long-term financial benefits and opportunities for strategic business growth. IT automation solutions can reduce operational costs by up to 90%. The technology handles ticket triage and automates incident response while predicting system failures and managing routine maintenance.

AI elevates IT operations, and the impacts are felt across the entire business. Asset performance monitoring becomes intelligent and proactive. Instead of static thresholds and scheduled checks, AI systems continuously analyse performance data, predict hardware failures and optimise maintenance schedules.

This prevents both downtime costs and unnecessary replacement spending. Process automation also frees IT time, reducing costs from human error: manual misconfigurations, missed patches and delayed responses caused by limited resources.

How AI empowers IT to deliver strategic value

IT cost management isn’t the endgame. It’s the starting point for strategic transformation. AI enables companies to optimise costs at scale while freeing up budgets for growth investments.

Organisations embracing AI for cost management are repositioning how their businesses view and leverage technology. When every investment must justify its existence, AI enables IT leaders to become architects of value, not just managers of expense by cutting costs and creating value. AI promotes agile resource allocation. When wasteful costs are eliminated proactively, IT executives gain flexibility to fund emerging opportunities and respond to changing business priorities.

Visibility is equally important in transforming IT into a strategic business driver. AI provides the data and insights needed to quantify IT’s business value. When investments are tracked and tied to business outcomes, CIOs can demonstrate the true ROI of the IT department and secure strategic support.

The real transformation happens when IT moves from reactive expense control to proactive value creation. AI-optimised IT operations have become the foundation for innovation, enabling teams to experiment and deliver competitive advantages.

To learn more about the major challenges contributing to wasteful IT spending and how AI and automation can help IT teams boost efficiency, improve asset visibility and optimise IT cost management, see Ivanti’s 2025 Technology at Work Report.