Many companies struggle to grow their automation efforts beyond initial pilots. While testing new tools can be exciting, successfully expanding automation across the entire organization requires more than just good technology. It’s about managing costs carefully and understanding the financial impact at every step. Without proper financial planning, automation projects can quickly become too expensive to sustain.

The Pitfalls of Relying on Pilot Success

Greg Holmes, the Field CTO for EMEA at Apptio, explains that many organizations fall into the trap of thinking a successful pilot means the project is ready to scale. Often, pilots show great results because they use over-provisioned infrastructure, which isn’t cost-effective in the long run. When the project moves to full production, the costs for compute, storage, and data transfer usually increase significantly. This can lead to unexpected expenses that weren’t visible during testing.

Holmes points out that many projects fail because they lack transparency around the real costs of running automation at scale. This financial opacity makes it hard for leaders to predict future liabilities and can cause projects to stall or be abandoned altogether. To truly succeed, organizations need to understand how costs grow as automation expands, not just during the pilot phase.

The Importance of Unit Economics in Automation

One key concept Holmes emphasizes is tracking the unit economics of automation. This means measuring the cost per transaction, API call, or customer served. During scaling, if these unit costs start to rise, it indicates a flawed business model. On the other hand, effective scaling should reduce these costs, making automation more profitable as it grows.

Holmes shares a case study from Liberty Mutual where they identified around $2.5 million in savings by monitoring consumption metrics. Instead of just counting labor hours saved, they looked at how much each transaction or API call cost. This deeper insight helped them optimize their automation efforts and better control expenses.

Bringing Financial Oversight Into Development

Holmes stresses that financial accountability shouldn’t be limited to the finance team. Developers and technical teams need to be involved in managing costs too. Using infrastructure-as-code tools like HashiCorp Terraform and GitHub, organizations can embed cost controls directly into the deployment process. These tools allow teams to see immediate cost estimates before resources are spun up.

This approach helps prevent over-provisioning and ensures that resources are used efficiently from the start. Instead of fixing issues after deployment, teams can proactively manage costs during development. This integration of financial governance into technical workflows makes scaling automation more predictable and cost-effective.

Ultimately, Holmes believes that combining automation with strong financial discipline leads to smarter, more sustainable growth. Organizations that track their costs carefully and involve developers in financial decisions will be better equipped to realize the full value of intelligent automation without breaking the budget.

Inspired by

• https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/news/apptio-why-scaling-intelligent-automation-requires-financial-rigour/

Sources

• apptio.com
• intelligentautomation-conference.com