From Cost Centre to Growth Driver: How AI Can Transform IT’s Role in the Business

IT has often been viewed through the lens of cost control, responsible for keeping the lights on, maintaining infrastructure, and ensuring employees have access to the tools they need. But that perception is rapidly evolving. With the rise of AI, IT has an opportunity to shift from a reactive support function to a proactive driver of business growth.

AI enables IT teams to move beyond service tickets and system uptime and begin delivering real-time insights, automating repetitive work, and supporting innovation across the organisation. In the right hands, AI transforms IT from backend operations into a core business enabler.

Beyond Maintenance: Unlocking Strategic Value

Traditional IT KPIs such as uptime, helpdesk resolution time, system availability still matter. But they reflect a narrow view of IT’s role. As organisations seek greater agility, AI gives IT the tools to drive more than just operational performance.

Rather than waiting for problems to occur, AI allows IT teams to anticipate risks, detect inefficiencies, and recommend improvements before they impact performance. It enables faster responses, smarter decisions, and better alignment between infrastructure and business goals.

By building AI into workflows, IT can contribute directly to:

• Operational efficiency
• Improved customer experience
• Strategic insights and forecasting

This evolution moves IT into a position of influence - no longer just servicing the business but shaping how it grows and competes.

Turning Insight into Impact

Data has always been a core IT asset. But without AI, making sense of that data especially in real time has been difficult. AI unlocks the ability to extract value from data at scale, providing insights that drive real commercial outcomes.

IT can use AI to surface patterns in customer behaviour, optimise cloud spend, identify underused tools, and support decision-making across finance, operations, and marketing. It also allows businesses to reduce manual reporting, streamline compliance processes, and improve incident response.

These outcomes make it easier for non-technical stakeholders to see IT not just as a line item on the budget, but as a partner in delivering results.

Choosing the Right Use Cases

Not every AI application delivers immediate business value. Success depends on choosing the right problems to solve - ones that are clearly linked to commercial outcomes.

High-impact AI use cases for IT often include:

• Predictive maintenance to reduce downtime and support uptime SLAs
• License and resource optimisation to cut unnecessary spend
• Intelligent automation of repetitive tasks like onboarding, ticket triage, or patch management

By selecting practical, measurable use cases, IT can demonstrate early wins and build momentum across the business.

Redefining the Role of IT Leadership

As AI becomes embedded in more business functions, IT leaders must step up as strategic advisors. This means translating technical possibilities into commercial value, and helping executives understand how AI fits into the bigger picture.

That shift requires a different kind of leadership - one focused on outcomes, not just systems. CIOs and IT managers must foster collaboration across departments, advocate for data quality and governance, and drive cultural change around experimentation and learning.

The most effective IT leaders today are the ones who understand both the architecture and the ambition who can design scalable solutions while keeping the business case front and centre.

Building the Right Foundations

AI can only deliver value when built on strong foundations. Many businesses still struggle with fragmented systems, poor data quality, and legacy infrastructure that limits agility.

To enable AI-driven IT transformation, organisations should prioritise:

• Data integration and cleanliness to ensure models work with accurate, relevant inputs
• Cloud readiness and infrastructure flexibility to support experimentation and scale
• Governance frameworks to manage risk, compliance, and ethical considerations

Without these elements in place, AI can become another isolated project instead of a core business capability.

AI is the tool that enables IT to do more than maintain - it allows IT to lead. By adopting an AI mindset, IT teams can drive productivity, speed up transformation, and influence how the entire organisation makes decisions and delivers value.

The businesses that recognise this shift will build IT functions that are agile, strategic, and central to their future growth. It is time to stop thinking of IT as overhead and start seeing it as a key partner in what comes next.