Customers are pressing IBM Apptio AI to give better, more useful responses, according to Eugene Khvostov.

Earlier this year, Apptio declared that the IBM AI development helper was being tested.

The tool is one of several new capabilities that Apptio has added to its FinOps suite, the business said in a press release last week. The term "FinOps" describes a methodology designed to assist companies in maximizing the financial performance of their cloud computing infrastructure.

According to the announcement, Apptio AI tool is also strengthening its Cloudability offering with a new feature that is presently in beta testing and aims to enable customers to more actively reduce costs for software development apps like GitHub before overruns occur.

In order to assist FinOps teams in measuring the financial and environmental effects of their cloud deployments, the business today announced the addition of new carbon emissions reporting metrics to Cloudability.

According to Gartner, global end-user expenditure on public cloud services is expected to increase by 20.4% from $563.6 billion in 2023 to $678.8 billion in 2024.

According to survey results released in June by IT consultant Esynergy, over three-quarters of businesses are having difficulty optimizing their cloud spending, and more than half of them expect to alter their cloud strategy in reaction to cost challenges.

As more businesses look to FinOps software providers like Apptio, which IBM purchased for $4.6 billion last year, the difficulty is driving a burgeoning industry. One of Apptio's rivals is VMware, which Broadcom purchased for $69 billion in 2023. 

One of IBM's products from the Apptio acquisition, Cloudability, is designed to assist companies in tracking, evaluating, and optimizing their cloud expenditures.

According to Khvostov, Apptio's new virtual assistant, who is powered by generative AI, may aid clients in identifying issues more rapidly by responding to specific queries like which departments inside the company are most responsible for increasing cloud expenses.