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Only 4% of Senior IT Budget Leaders Are Highly Satisfied With AI Cost and ROI Tracking

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Only 4% of Senior IT Budget Leaders Are Highly Satisfied With AI Cost and ROI Tracking ROANOKE, Va.--( BUSINESS WIRE)--Nicus Software, Inc. (Nicus), a leading provider of enterprise IT Financial Management (ITFM) solutions, today announced new research revealing a significant gap in how large organizations manage the financial impact and value of AI investments. Only 4% of senior IT and technology budget leaders surveyed are highly satisfied with their ability to categorize and track AI usage, benefits, token consumption costs, and return on AI investment. Just 1% are highly satisfied with their ability to establish the taxonomy and cost-category structure needed to classify emerging spend.

79% of senior IT budget leaders rank detecting and explaining financial variances among their most valuable potential AI capabilities.

The findings are published in The ITFM Value Gap: Why established programs still struggle to support executive decisions—and what ITFM must deliver next. IT Financial Management, or ITFM, is the discipline and technology organizations use to plan, allocate, forecast, analyze, and govern IT spending, connecting financial data to business value and investment decisions. As AI adds new consumption-based costs and investment choices to already complex IT portfolios, these capabilities are becoming increasingly relevant to both IT and finance leaders.

The report identifies what Nicus calls the ITFM Value Gap: the distance between the financial management capabilities an organization has established and the value those capabilities create at the point of decision. The research suggests that organizations can have established cost models, data, processes, and reporting while still struggling to provide the timely evidence executives need to decide what to fund, change, optimize, reallocate, or stop.

That disconnect extends well beyond AI. Sixty-eight percent of the 150 senior IT and technology budget leaders surveyed report five or more unresolved high-priority decision needs, even though 69% rate the maturity of their ITFM programs at 8 or higher on a 10-point scale. Among those who rate their maturity at 8 or higher, 55% still report five or more unresolved high-priority needs.

“AI is creating a financial management challenge before many organizations have established a shared language for addressing it,” said Gavin Drake, Chief Marketing Officer at Nicus. “IT and finance leaders need to connect consumption and total cost to accountable owners, use cases, and expected outcomes so they can make informed decisions about where to scale, optimize, change, or stop investment. More broadly, our research suggests that ITFM maturity has to mean more than having the right data and processes in place. Its value is ultimately determined by whether leaders have the information they need to make better decisions while there is still time to influence the outcome.”

The stakes are increasingly important as IT and AI investments compete for enterprise resources and executives demand clearer evidence of business value. Ninety percent of respondents rate determining whether IT investments delivered their promised outcomes as highly important, but only 13% are highly satisfied with their current ability to do so. Ninety-one percent rate identifying spending that can be reduced or deferred without disrupting business outcomes as highly important, while only 9% are highly satisfied with that capability.

For CIOs and their finance counterparts, the findings point to a broader mandate for IT financial management. Cost transparency remains fundamental, but executives increasingly need to understand what changed, why it changed, how forecasts are shifting, whether investments are producing the expected return, and where capital and resources can be redirected. The report argues that the value of IT financial management should therefore be measured not only by the financial information it produces, but by its ability to support investment accountability, forecasting, optimization, resource allocation, and executive decision-making.

The research also shows that senior IT budget leaders expect AI itself to play a role in improving those decisions. Asked to select up to three of the most valuable potential AI capabilities for IT financial decision-making, 79% selected detecting and explaining budget variances, 74% selected continuously identifying IT cost optimization opportunities, and 62% selected automatically updating forecasts as actual results become available.

Together, the findings highlight two related challenges for enterprises: developing the financial structures needed to govern AI as an investment, while also using AI to shorten the path from changing financial information to informed action. The report emphasizes that trusted AI-assisted decisions still depend on governed underlying data, consistent financial structures, accountable ownership, and traceable financial logic.

The research is informing Nicus' continued focus on helping IT, finance, and business leaders turn IT financial data into decision-ready insight. This includes Nicus' ITFM Value Framework, as well as forthcoming conversational AI and AI-native reporting capabilities designed to help users create decision-ready insights and narratives from governed IT financial data.

The ITFM Value Gap Report is freely available at nicus.com/valuegap.

Research Methodology

Nicus commissioned a third-party research agency to survey 150 qualified senior IT and technology budget leaders in North America between June 11 and July 29, 2026. Respondents were full-time employees at organizations with at least $50 million in annual IT spend and were personally accountable for governing and defending an IT budget to senior leadership, the C-suite, or the board. The study measured the importance of and satisfaction with 20 IT financial decision-making outcomes using 10-point scales. Findings are directional rather than population estimates, and percentages are rounded.

About Nicus

Nicus delivers clarity, control, and confidence in every technology investment, helping leaders maximize the value of technology spend across the enterprise. Our IT Financial Management (ITFM) and Modern Technology Business Management (Modern TBM) solutions are delivered on the Nicus Cloud or natively on the ServiceNow platform, enabling organizations to transform complexity into actionable insight. As organizations increase investment in AI and other emerging technologies, Nicus helps leaders understand, manage, and optimize the cost and business impact of these investments. Trusted by Fortune 2000 companies, Nicus empowers IT, finance, and business leaders to make smarter decisions, optimize spend, and drive better business outcomes. Learn more at www.nicus.com.

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