Rewiring ITAM for AI: Is Your AI a Cost to Cut or Value to Build?

Date: Monday, June 29 Title: Rewiring ITAM for AI: Is Your AI a Cost to Cut or Value to Build? Event Description: When the budget tightens, every line gets a label: cost to cut, or value to build. AI usually lands in the wrong column. It shows up as a tooling expense — a number a CFO can trim — when the value it creates is diffuse, downstream, and hard to put on the same line. The question is no longer what your AI costs. The question is whether your leadership sees it as a cost to cut or a capability to build, because that single framing decides its future. In this eleventh session of The ITAM Kitchen's new series, Rewiring ITAM for AI, we get into the budgeting fight directly. We talk about how AI gets miscategorized as a cuttable cost, how to make the value visible enough to survive a budget review, and how to give your leadership the frame that protects the AI investment instead of trimming it in the first round. At Cardinal Trust Financial, the AI assistant spend showed up in a cost review as a $200K line with no obvious revenue attached, and the reflex was to cut it — until the team tied it to the $1.1M in vendor leverage and the audit-readiness it had enabled, and the line moved from "trim" to "protect." Same spend, opposite decision, decided entirely by framing. At the Federal Asset Modernization Office (FAMO), AI was funded as a one-time pilot expense rather than a standing capability, so when the pilot money ran out the capability evaporated — even though it was the only thing letting two people serve five agencies. AI dies in the budget when it's labeled a cost and lives when it's framed as a capability. This session gives you the language to make that case with numbers, and a frame for leadership that the cheapest cut can be the most expensive one. AI Prompt: 🍳 The Test Kitchen — frame it as a cost-cutting exercise and watch it reach for the AI line first: "Here's our AI tooling spend and what it does: [PASTE]. We're in a cost-cutting review — tell me what to cut." 🎯 Built for: ITAM Professionals | SAM Managers | CMDB Administrators | CIOs | CTOs | CFOs 📅 Live: Monday, June 29 | 10:00 AM EST | YouTube & LinkedIn Live