Revolutionizing Business Efficiency: How Intelligent Automation Fuels Sustainable Growth

The Quest for Sustainable Enterprise-Wide Deployments: Unlocking the Power of Intelligent Automation with Financial Rigour

In today’s fast-paced, tech-driven world, organisations are constantly seeking ways to stay ahead of the curve. One area that has garnered significant attention in recent years is intelligent automation – a process that leverages advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and robotics to automate repetitive and mundane tasks.

Financial accountability plays a crucial role in deploying intelligent automation successfully. Greg Holmes, Field CTO for EMEA at Apptio, an IBM company, stresses the importance of financial rigour. “When we integrate FinOps capabilities with automation, we’re looking at a change from being very reactive on cost management to being very proactive around value engineering,” he explains.

This shift in approach enables organisations to track resource consumption straight from the beginning, rather than waiting months or years to assess whether things are getting value. Holmes notes that if a pilot demonstrates that automating a process saves 100 hours a month, leadership thinks that’s really successful. However, what it fails to track is that the pilot sometimes is running on over-provisioned infrastructure, so it looks like it performs really well.

Moving that workload to production changes the calculus. The requirements for compute, storage, and data transfer increase, leading to higher costs. To prevent this, organisations must track the marginal cost at scale. This involves monitoring unit economics, such as the cost per customer served or cost per transaction.

Effective scaling should see these unit costs decrease. Conversely, if the cost per customer increases as the customer base grows, the business model is flawed. Holmes cites a case study from Liberty Mutual where the insurer was able to find around $2.5 million of savings by bringing in consumption metrics and “not just looking at labour hours that they were saving.”

Financial accountability cannot sit solely with the finance department. Holmes advocates for putting governance “back in the hands of the developers into their development tools and workloads.” Integration with infrastructure-as-code tools like HashiCorp Terraform and GitHub allows organisations to enforce policies during deployment.

This approach enables teams to verify they are “deploying the right things at the right time.” Rather than deploying things and then fixing them up, which gets into the whole whack-a-mole kind of problem, companies can deploy resources programmatically with immediate cost estimates. Holmes explains that this integration helps to bridge the gap between technology and finance.

The TBM taxonomy provides a standardised framework to reconcile these views. It maps technical resources (such as compute, storage, and labour) into IT towers and further up to business capabilities. This structure translates technical inputs into business outputs, enabling executives to make informed decisions.

“I don’t necessarily know what goes into all the IT layers underneath it,” Holmes says, describing the business user’s perspective. “But because we’ve got this taxonomy, I can get a detailed bill that tells me about my service consumption and precisely which costs are driving it to be more expensive as I consume more.”

Organisations burdened by legacy ERP systems face a binary choice: automation as a patch, or as a bridge to modernisation. Holmes warns that if a company is “just trying to mask inefficient processes and not redesign them,” they are merely “building up more technical debt.” A total cost of ownership (TCO) approach helps determine the correct strategy.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia utilised a TCO model across 2,000 different applications – of various maturity stages – to assess their full lifecycle costs. This analysis included hidden costs such as infrastructure, labour, and the engineering time required to keep automation running.

“Just because of something’s legacy doesn’t mean you have to retire it,” Holmes says. “Some of those legacy systems are worth maintaining just because the value is so good.” However, calculating the cost of the automation wrappers required to keep an old system functional reveals a different reality. “Sometimes when you add up the TCO approach, and you’re including all these automation layers around it, you suddenly realise, the real cost of keeping that old system alive is not just the old system, it’s those extra layers,” Holmes argues.

Avoiding sticker shock requires a budgeting strategy that balances variable costs with long-term commitments. While variable costs (OPEX) offer flexibility, they can fluctuate wildly based on demand and engineering efficiency. Holmes advises that longer-term visibility enables better investment decisions. Committing to specific technologies or platforms over a multi-year horizon allows organisations to negotiate economies of scale and standardise architecture.

“Because you’ve made those longer term commitments and you’ve standardised on different platforms and things like that, it makes it easier to build the right thing out for the long term,” Holmes says.

Combining tight management of variable costs with strategic commitments supports enterprises in scaling intelligent automation without the volatility that often derails transformation. By adopting a more proactive approach to cost management and value engineering, organisations can unlock the full potential of intelligent automation and achieve sustainable enterprise-wide deployments.

As the business landscape continues to evolve at breakneck speed, organisations must adapt quickly to stay ahead of the curve. Scaling intelligent automation successfully requires more than just technical expertise; it demands financial rigour. By tracking unit economics, integrating FinOps capabilities with automation, and adopting a TBM taxonomy, organisations can unlock the full potential of intelligent automation and achieve sustainable enterprise-wide deployments.

Greg Holmes, Field CTO for EMEA at Apptio, will be sharing his insights on scaling intelligent automation successfully during the Intelligent Automation Conference Global in London on 4-5 February 2026. Join him to hear more about frameworks, risks, and real-world lessons.