Next week, our TBM community heads to Miami. The agenda is full of cloud governance, FinOps maturity, AI adoption, and cost forecasting. And it all makes sense.
Cloud spend is surging because every company is racing toward AI, automation, and data-driven innovation.
Full transparency: I love cloud. I also love AI. I’m flying in early so I can complete my FinOps certification through the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council over the weekend. Cloud, driven by AI, is only going up, and teams need better tooling and processes to keep it predictable.
But while AI and Cloud dominate the conversation, they're really just a slice of the total technology spend tab.
Even if you tighten up AI-driven cloud, a massive portion of your technology budget is still hiding out of sight. Most organizations have large spend categories that never hit the spotlight:
- Telecom and network connectivity
- Mobility and device fleets
- SaaS and collaboration tools
- Data circuits, carrier contracts, SD-WAN, security services
- Legacy services that cost an arm and a leg that need to be ugraded
When AI and cloud get 90% of the attention, the rest of the stack quietly consumes millions of dollars a year. That is where AMI lives.
Can I Steal a Little Airtime from AI and Cloud, Please?
Most of the spend (and most of the savings opportunity) is still very much outside the cloud.
So cloud absolutely matters, but right now everyone's crowding the grape stand while the watermelons are sitting untouched.
Gartner’s 2025 projections show:
- Public cloud: ~13% of total IT spend (~$723.4B)
- IT services + Communications Services (Telecom): ~55% Combined
- Software (much of which is not SaaS): ~23%
What About the Remaining 86.7% of Tech Spend?
What do we have? What are we paying for? Is it billed correctly? Who owns it? How do we optimize it?
Answering those questions is difficult when the data is scattered across invoices, portals, carrier contracts, and spreadsheets.
You deserve better insight
You should not have to guess about spend or fight vendor complexity alone. You should be able to walk into a leadership meeting with confidence, not caveats.
AMI Helps You Unlock New IT Budget
We help you shine a light on the part of your technology budget that isn’t quite as sexy, and in 2025, people aren’t eager to talk about:
- We make your entire tech portfolio visible: Cloud, telecom, network, mobility, SaaS, and carrier services come together in one clean view. Every service has an owner, a location, a cost center, and a contract. No more spreadsheets. No more unknowns.
- We validate every dollar you spend: We benchmark rates so you know if you are paying too much. We validate your existing rates against your contracts. We perform forensic auditing on taxes and surcharges, not just MRCs and NRCs. When something’s wrong, we help you recover it. This is real money. Not theoretical savings.
- We help you optimize now and protect against drift later: Once everything is clean, we stay with you. New users, contract renewals, cloud expansion, pricing changes, disconnects, plan updates. We make sure your spend stays accurate and predictable.
- We free up your team: So you can focus on strategy. No more late nights crunching numbers.
Just think of the extra money that could be funding AI pilots, security upgrades, headcount, or modernization initiatives.
And Yes, We Help with Cloud Too 😊
Cloud allocation, tagging, showbacks, and optimization are part of the journey. We live and breathe it, but let’s be practical: cloud offers meaningful ROI, but when you bring network, telecom, mobility, SaaS, and utilities into the equation, the payback multiplies.
After all, 60% of a watermelon is worth more than 100% of a grape...
This Win is for You
In a budget-tight environment where every department has to prove value, finding recoverable dollars without cutting staff or slowing projects makes you the hero in the room.
To help you find the low-hanging fruit most organizations never see, check out our Free Network Inventory Report + Spend Health Check program where you’ll get:
- A production-ready Service Provider Inventory Report created right off your largest technology vendor invoices
- A complimentary spend analysis to see what opportunities exist to reduce your spend on those invoices
You’ll walk away with clarity, confidence, credibility and budget you can count on.
