Blog AI Governance Starts When IT Gets Off the Hamster Wheel

Now that AI has found its place among end-user populations, we’re hearing and reading horror stories about exorbitant token costs. Recently, the tech world collectively gasped at a headline that felt like a typo: a major enterprise accidentally burned through $500 million on Anthropic’s Claude AI in just one month.

While this sounds like an anomaly, it could happen anywhere. What’s to blame? A catastrophic failure to set usage limits. A lack of real-time governance. And tokenmaxxing, a toxic new corporate trend where employees blindly burn through computing power trying to meet their organization’s expectations for AI usage.

On top of this, we can point to several other security incidents related to uncharted AI waters. Businesses are now faced with an uncomfortable question: Is your IT organization ready to address the perils of AI governance? Or are they still focused on running IT operations as usual?

Let’s be honest. IT wasn’t ignoring AI on purpose while users were racking up millions in token costs. They were likely trying to address requests from their leadership to move quickly with AI while still being knee-deep in the usual chaos of IT. AI didn’t make any of the old problems of IT go away, it only compounded organizational risk.

There are still issues with legacy technology, resource and knowledge gaps, security, end-user satisfaction, and a host of other projects and problems that exist. On top of that, AI is hogging technology budgets. The adage of “doing more with less” sounds like a joke.

Why AI governance changes IT operations

IT needs a massive, immediate paradigm shift. As industry experts frequently highlight in their IT spend forecasts, the most successful CIOs are moving away from traditional cost center management and transforming into business strategists.

You need to get out of the business of keeping the lights on to be successful in the new AI era.

If AI is the future of your business, managed services are the vehicle that will enable you to get there. Leaders need to shift their focus from keeping the hamster wheel spinning. Instead, they must look at basic operations functions — such as end-user support, device lifecycle management, enterprise cloud productivity/SaaS management, etc. — the same way they look at other services in their organization.

Your facilities management department isn’t running janitorial in your buildings. Finance isn’t processing payroll anymore. And while we probably take this for granted today, there was a time when companies delivered their own goods and services door to door — we don’t do this anymore because it’s not productive for most organizations to focus on running logistics when they have product to sell.

AI is shifting IT operations in the same way. Forward-thinking IT leaders should be asking themselves some critical questions:

• Do we want to make decisions about how we secure our business or manage our own Security Operations Center (SOC)?
• Do we want to do daily administration of Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), identity, and productivity platforms, or lead — and finish — projects that modernize those platforms and incorporate new technology in the future?
• Do we want to fix laptops and manage the device lifecycle or focus on testing the new hardware leading the AI revolution?
• Do we want to try to predict fluctuating CapEx project costs or manage OpEx contracts?
• Do we want our high-value resources managing platforms and processes, or do we want them to define the technology and governance that will make us leaders in the new era of AI?

The answers to all these questions may seem obvious. You don’t want to be focused on the technology, processes, and resources of the past. Nor do you want to stay responsible for keeping the IT operations hamster wheel running.

We’ve been saying for a while that IT needs to be a true partner for the business in the information age, and that is even more important in the age of AI.

In addition to letting you focus on higher value work, offloading IT operations also provides the benefits of more predictable costs (think of it as a utility), more modern experiences, and even potential savings.

How managed IT services support AI governance

The aforementioned $500 million token bill should’ve been a massive wake-up call for every C-suite and IT leader.

As a recent Forbes technology council piece noted, the companies to survive the current AI gold rush will be the ones that effectively govern their tech stack. And, even if you do have decent cost controls in place, you’re likely still leaving money on the table by not exploring the opportunity to move costly cloud AI workloads to on-premises solutions and local processing with fixed costs.

Imagine what you could do if you had the time to let the right resources focus on the right things? The era of DIY IT operations is over. The financial stakes are simply too high.

Insight has a wealth of expertise, knowledge, and services to usher you into the AI era. It’s time to move the mundane to the experts. Let Insight handle your device ecosystems, so your high-value technical talent can roll up their sleeves, build real business strategies, and support the strategic needs of your organization.

Set it. Forget it. And for the love of your budget, go check your AI token dashboards.