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Brightfin Names Preeti Shukla Chief Product and AI Officer

Helen Domeck — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:13:35 GMT

Enterprise AI SaaS leader to accelerate Brightfin’s AI-Native platform for IT financial management

Englewood, CO — July 17, 2026 — Brightfin, the only IT Financial Management (ITFM) and Technology Expense Management solution built natively on ServiceNow, today announced the appointment of Preeti Shukla as Chief Product and AI Officer (CPAIO). In this newly created role, Shukla will lead product strategy and artificial intelligence across the Brightfin platform, advancing the company’s mission to make every technology decision grounded in financial truth, operational clarity, and intelligent automation.

Shukla brings two decades of experience building and scaling customer-facing, enterprise-grade B2B SaaS, fintech, and marketplace products across Fortune 100 companies and high-growth startups, including leadership roles at Workday and Oracle. A recognized authority on applied AI, she is a Gartner-recognized thought leader and author on AI SaaS and product engineering, with deep expertise in secure, compliant financial systems and agentic AI. Her appointment reflects Brightfin’s commitment to building intelligence into its products from the ground up rather than bolting it onto legacy systems.

As CPAIO, Shukla will own the next phases of Brightfin’s AI roadmap: expanding the company’s context-aware intelligence layer and AI agents that understand the language of IT finance, and driving AI-powered optimization that proactively surfaces savings and acts on them. She will partner closely with engineering, customers, and go-to-market teams to translate Brightfin’s unified budget-to-billing data model into measurable outcomes for enterprise IT and finance leaders.

“Preeti is exactly the leader we need as Brightfin enters its next chapter,” said Joel Martins, Chief Executive Officer at Brightfin. “She has spent her career turning ambitious AI ideas into enterprise products that customers trust with their most critical financial data. Her track record of building high-performing product and engineering organizations, combined with her depth in agentic AI, will accelerate the value we deliver to every customer. We’re thrilled to welcome her to the team.”

“Brightfin has done something rare: it built the deepest IT financial data model in the market and made AI the product, not a feature,” said Preeti Shukla, Chief Product and AI Officer at Brightfin. “That foundation is the perfect launchpad for agentic AI that doesn’t just answer questions but optimizes workflows and drives real savings. I’m excited to help our customers move from digging through reports to getting clear, trustworthy answers about their IT spend, and to shape a product roadmap where intelligence is felt in every interaction.”

Shukla’s appointment builds on Brightfin’s momentum following its acquisition by Proven Optics and the launch of its AI-Native architecture, reinforcing the company’s position at the intersection of IT financial management and enterprise AI.

About Brightfin

Brightfin is committed to shaping a world where every technology decision is grounded in financial truth, operational clarity, and intelligent automation — enabling organizations to reduce total spend and reinvest in critical innovation. For more information, visit www.brightfin.com.

Media Contact

Jacob Mollohan
Senior Director of Marketing
jacob.mollohan@brightfin.com
720-235-9837

Brightfin Names Michael Schifman Vice President of Marketing

Helen Domeck — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:07:26 GMT

Technology B2B marketing leader joins the ServiceNow-native ITFM and technology expense management company to accelerate demand and growth

ENGLEWOOD, Colorado — July 13, 2026 — Brightfin, the ServiceNow-native technology expense management (TEM) and IT financial management (ITFM) company backed by Silversmith Capital Partners, today announced the appointment of Michael Schifman as Vice President of Marketing. Schifman will lead the company’s marketing strategy, demand generation, and go-to-market execution as Brightfin scales its ServiceNow-native platform for enterprise and public-sector customers.

Schifman brings more than 27 years of marketing leadership to the role, with deep experience across IT and managed services, SaaS, telecommunications, manufacturing, financial services, and the ServiceNow partner ecosystem — including a tenure at a ServiceNow Elite Partner. He has built and led integrated marketing, strategy, and demand generation programs at organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and has launched national campaigns and brought new SaaS and consumer products to market.

“Brightfin sits at the center of one of the most important conversations in enterprise technology — how organizations see, control, and optimize their technology spend,” said Schifman. “With global IT spend projected to exceed $6 trillion, doing that natively inside ServiceNow is a powerful advantage. I’m excited to build the marketing engine that brings this story to the IT and finance leaders who need it.”

“Mike is a proven builder who pairs marketing science with real growth discipline,” said Joel Martins, CRO at Brightfin. “He has stood up and scaled marketing functions across exactly the markets we serve. His leadership will help us reach more customers and accelerate our momentum.”

He holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology with an emphasis in Communication Studies from the University of Kansas and an MBA with a marketing emphasis from Benedictine College. He is based in the Kansas City metro.

IT Finance AI

Helen Domeck — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:01:21 GMT

Join us July 9th for a live demo of Spend Clearly AI — natural language querying across TEM, ITFM, and your entire ServiceNow financial environment.

If you work in IT finance, you know the drill. Someone from the business needs a number — a telecom spend breakdown, a cost allocation variance, a budget vs. actuals for a specific service tower. You know the data exists. It’s in ServiceNow. But getting from question to answer still takes longer than it should, because the data is complex, the systems are technical, and the people asking the questions aren’t always the ones who know how to find the answers.

That’s the gap Spend Clearly AI is built to close.

What Spend Clearly AI Does

Spend Clearly AI sits across your full IT financial environment in ServiceNow — spanning both TEM (Telecom Expense Management) and ITFM (IT Financial Management). Instead of running reports, writing queries, or routing requests through a specialist, anyone on your team can ask a question in plain language and get a clear, accurate answer.

Telecom invoice anomaly? Ask it. Cost model variance against forecast? Ask it. Chargeback breakdown by service tower? Ask it.

One AI layer. All your financial data. No need to expose the underlying architecture to every stakeholder who needs an answer.

Why This Matters for IT Leaders

The manual report-pull workflow has a real cost — and it’s not just time. When financial data requires a specialist to interpret, the entire org moves slower. Stakeholders wait. Decisions get made on stale information. And your team spends cycles on one-off requests instead of higher-value work.

Spend Clearly AI changes the equation:

Your team spends less time fielding ad hoc data requests
Stakeholders get answers on demand, without needing to understand your data architecture
Financial visibility spreads across the org — not just to the people who know how to pull a report
You get one unified AI layer instead of point solutions stitched together across use cases

What We’re Demoing on July 9th

In this 30-minute webinar, we’ll show Spend Clearly AI working live inside ServiceNow across both TEM and ITFM use cases. You’ll see how it handles the kinds of questions your team gets asked every week — and how it surfaces answers without exposing or oversimplifying the data behind them.

We’ll also walk through what deployment actually looks like for IT teams already running ServiceNow, and close with a live Q&A so you can get your specific questions answered.

Date: July 9th | Time: 12:30 PM MT | Length: 30 minutes

If you’re responsible for IT financial data in ServiceNow — whether that’s telecom spend, cost allocation, chargeback, or forecasting — this is 30 minutes worth your time.

Reserve your spot →

IT Chargeback for AI Spend: How to Turn Runaway AI Costs Into Accountability - brightfin

Helen Domeck — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:04:27 GMT

IT Chargeback for AI Spend: How Finance and IT Leaders Control AI Costs

AI is now the fastest-growing line item in the IT budget — and one of the hardest to govern. IT chargeback and showback give finance and IT leaders the visibility to control AI costs today. Worldwide AI spending is forecast to reach $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump in a single year, according to Gartner. Here is how showback and chargeback bring that spend under control inside ServiceNow — and where Brightfin ITFM is headed next.

Why AI costs are so hard to control

AI has become the fastest-growing item in the enterprise technology budget. Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion in 2026, with AI infrastructure alone accounting for more than 45% of that total and generative AI model spending climbing roughly 80% year over year.

For CIOs and CFOs, the question is no longer whether to invest in AI. It is whether they can see and control what they are already spending. Three traits make AI spend uniquely difficult to govern:

It is consumption-based and volatile. Costs accrue by tokens processed and GPU hours consumed, so one successful pilot can multiply a department’s bill almost overnight.
It is decentralized. Marketing, engineering, support, and finance each buy AI independently, creating “shadow AI” that never appears in a central forecast.
It is hard to attribute. Shared model endpoints serve dozens of teams at once, so no single owner is obvious.

The result is an accountability gap. Finance leaders face mounting pressure to answer the question every board is now asking — what is our return on AI spend? — without the visibility to do it.

What is IT chargeback for AI spend?

IT chargeback for AI spend is the practice of allocating the cost of AI services — model and API usage, AI-optimized infrastructure, copilots, and cloud consumption — back to the business units, teams, or projects that consume them. Each dollar is tied to the team that spent it, and that cost moves into the team’s own budget.

This is where IT financial management (ITFM) earns its keep. Chargeback turns a single, opaque AI invoice into a clear bill of accountability for every consuming team.

Meet Brightfin at ITFMA 2026

The IT Financial Management Association’s Financial World of Information Technology conference runs July 20–24, 2026 at the Rosen Plaza in Orlando, FL. brightfin will be there to show how ITFM on ServiceNow turns AI spend into a strategic advantage.

Showback vs. chargeback: what is the difference?

Showback reports what each team consumed and what it cost without transferring money. Chargeback bills that cost back to the consuming team’s budget. Showback builds awareness; chargeback drives accountability. Both rest on the same foundation: clean, automated cost allocation.

Most organizations should start with showback to build trust in the data, then move to chargeback once allocation is accurate and accepted.

How showback and chargeback work in modern ITFM

The encouraging news is that the core discipline already works today. Brightfin ITFM, built 100% natively on ServiceNow, lets IT and finance leaders bring AI and cloud spend into the same framework they use for the rest of the technology budget. It rests on three capabilities:

Cost transparency. Automate data management, expense-driver alignment, and cost allocation across services and business units — including cloud workloads imported directly from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Billing simplicity. Generate system-driven invoices that communicate costs, differentiate service cost drivers, and provide digestible traceability — turning showback and chargeback into a repeatable process.
Budget clarity. Run budgets, forecasts, and variance analysis through automated workflows so spend shows up in your numbers in real time, not at quarter close.

The four steps of AI chargeback

A lean IT finance team can run AI chargeback in four steps:

Capture every source. Bring AI and cloud invoices, model APIs, AI-optimized infrastructure, and SaaS copilots into one system of record automatically.
Define an allocation model. Split shared resources, such as a common model endpoint or GPU cluster, using AI-native usage metrics rather than rough estimates.
Map costs to consumers. Tie every dollar to a department, cost center, or project so ownership is unambiguous.
Report, then bill. Start with transparent showback and graduate to automated chargeback as confidence grows.

Where AI cost optimization is headed next

Today’s tooling handles cloud and AI invoices well. But AI introduces cost dynamics that traditional allocation models were never designed for: usage measured in tokens and GPU-seconds, shared model endpoints serving dozens of teams, and bills that can swing by orders of magnitude from one week to the next. That is why Brightfin is building toward AI-native IT cost optimization, with a simple mission: help CIOs see clearly and spend better.

Seeing clearly starts with unifying your AI and IT estate in one place — breaking spend down by vendor, product, and model, tracking what is sanctioned versus what is actually running, and surfacing the behavioral signals that show where costs come from and why. That visibility is exactly what real chargeback depends on: you cannot allocate what you cannot see.

Spending better starts with AI usage itself. Token management is the lever most enterprises do not know they have. By breaking token spend down by model, team, and input versus output — and flagging the waste hiding in plain sight, from runaway prompts to oversized context windows and silent retries — organizations can fund their AI strategy out of the savings instead of asking the CFO for more budget.

On that foundation, AI assistants make the work effortless:

A plain-language budget Q&A answers spend questions in seconds.
An invoice assistant flags exceptions and billing errors automatically.
A contract assistant surfaces renewal risks and cost exposure.

The vision is an ITFM platform where AI spend is as measurable, allocable, and accountable as any other service — all inside ServiceNow. We would love to compare notes with the IT finance community on what that future should look like.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between AI showback and chargeback?

Showback reports what each team consumed and what it cost without transferring money. Chargeback bills that cost back to the consuming team’s budget. Showback builds awareness, while chargeback drives accountability.

How do you allocate shared AI costs?

Shared resources like a common model endpoint or GPU cluster are split using an allocation model based on usage metrics — tokens, API calls, or compute hours — or an agreed percentage. A capable ITFM platform automates the split.

Will chargeback slow down AI adoption?

Done well, no. The goal is not to discourage AI use but to make its cost visible so teams invest where the return is highest. Transparency tends to accelerate adoption of the highest-value use cases.

How does Brightfin handle AI and cloud costs?

Brightfin ITFM imports cloud and AI invoices from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud into ServiceNow, allocates them to the right consumers, and generates the invoices that power showback and chargeback.

How much is enterprise AI spending growing?

Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% increase year over year, with AI infrastructure accounting for more than 45% of the total. This makes accurate AI cost allocation through showback and chargeback a priority for IT finance leaders.

Brightfin at ITFMA 2026

Helen Domeck — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:20:14 GMT

Technology spend is growing in complexity—and so is the pressure to manage it well. That’s why ITFMA’s annual Financial World of Information Technology Conference remains one of the most important gatherings on the IT finance calendar. This July, brightfin will be there.

About ITFMA 2026

The IT Financial Management Association (ITFMA) has long served as the premier professional organization for IT finance practitioners. Each year, the Financial World of Information Technology Conference brings together finance and IT leaders from across industries to share best practices, explore emerging disciplines, and tackle the challenges that matter most to their organizations.

This year’s event takes place July 20–24, 2026 at the Rosen Plaza Hotel in Orlando, Florida. With over 100 sessions, workshops, and case studies, the agenda spans IT Financial Management, Technology Business Management (TBM), Cloud Financial Management (FinOps), cost allocation, budgeting, and performance optimization. It’s a concentrated week of peer learning and practical insight for anyone responsible for governing technology spend.

Brightfin’s Session: See Clearly, Spend Better

Brightfin VP of Sales Nick Reade will take the stage with a session that speaks directly to one of the most persistent challenges in enterprise IT: the fragmentation of technology spend data.

Session Title: See Clearly, Spend Better: Brightfin’s ITFM and TEM Solutions on ServiceNow

Despite technology being one of the largest and most complex line items on the balance sheet, most organizations are still managing it reactively—relying on siloed data, disconnected point tools, and spreadsheets that can’t keep pace with the scale or speed of modern IT environments. Mobile, telecom, cloud, and IT services each generate their own data streams, but rarely does that data come together in a way that allows finance and IT leaders to answer the questions that matter: What are we spending? Where can we cut? Are our investments delivering value?

In this session, Nick will walk through how brightfin’s IT Financial Management (ITFM) and Technology Expense Management (TEM) solutions—built natively on ServiceNow—give organizations a single, governed source of truth for all technology spend. The session will cover how brightfin:

Eliminates spreadsheets and disconnected tools by embedding financial intelligence directly within the workflows teams already use
Automates lifecycle management of mobile, telecom, and cloud assets
Delivers budgeting, forecasting, and chargeback capabilities that enable smarter, more confident investment decisions

Whether your organization is just beginning its ITFM journey or looking to consolidate fragmented expense tools into a unified platform, this session will show what’s possible when technology finance is managed at the platform level—inside ServiceNow, where your work already lives.

Why This Matters

The conversation around IT financial management is shifting. Organizations are no longer satisfied with visibility for its own sake—they want actionable intelligence that drives accountability, informs planning, and demonstrates the value of technology investment across the business. The ITFMA conference is exactly the right venue for that conversation, and brightfin’s approach—purpose-built on ServiceNow rather than bolted alongside it—offers a differentiated answer to what the market is asking for.

Connect With Us at ITFMA

If you’re attending ITFMA 2026, we’d welcome the opportunity to connect. Whether you’re exploring ITFM for the first time or evaluating platforms to consolidate your technology expense management, our team is ready to talk through what’s possible.

Brightfin is a ServiceNow-native provider of IT Financial Management and Technology Expense Management solutions, helping enterprise organizations gain full visibility and control over their technology spend.

Gartner 2026 Managed Mobility Services Market Guide

Helen Domeck — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:35:02 GMT

On May 12, 2026, Gartner published its Market Guide for Managed Mobility Services, Global (ID G00839520, by Katja Ruud and Matt Baldino). Brightfin is named as a Representative Vendor.

If you manage a mobile fleet — whether you call it MMS, mobility, EMM, or “the never-ending pile of devices, invoices, and tickets” — this is the Gartner publication you’ll want to read end-to-end. It’s the clearest snapshot of where the managed mobility services market is going, what enterprise buyers are actually asking for, and how to evaluate providers without getting buried in feature lists.

Below are five takeaways that stood out to us. The full guide goes deeper, and you can download the Brightfin-licensed reprint at the end of this post.

Key numbers from the 2026 report

Average MMS contract length: 24–36 months
Some providers weight XLAs at up to ~70% of customer health scores
Trends Gartner highlights: AI integration, sustainability, operational efficiencies, cost optimization
6 sourcing steps Gartner recommends — from requirements to governance and XLAs

1. The MMS business case has flipped from cost-centric to employee-centric

The report’s first key finding is, frankly, the biggest shift in the category: “The business case for managed mobility services (MMS) has evolved from entirely cost-centric to become more employee-centric, with an increased focus on security and enabling productivity.”

Translation: leaders who only talk savings are getting left behind. The new conversation includes HR (because device experience shapes attrition), security (because mobile is the new endpoint), and the business itself (because frontline productivity moves revenue). If your last MMS RFP only graded providers on price, your next one should grade them on user sentiment, XLAs, and digital employee experience.

What this means for IT leaders: build a stakeholder map before you build a vendor shortlist. Sourcing, procurement, IT, HR, security, and the business need to be in the room — and they need to agree on what “successful MMS engagement” actually looks like.

2. AI has crossed from “interesting” to “table stakes”

Gartner identifies AI integration as one of the dominant trends reshaping the MMS market, and it’s no longer just chatbots and ticket deflection. According to the report, the majority of profiled providers use AI for device performance diagnostics and financial management tasks. A growing share use AI-driven real-time language translation for global help desks, AI camera imaging for grading end-of-life devices, and AI orchestration for logistics.

On the financial side specifically, providers are using AI to automate invoice processing, cost categorization, error detection, and tariff optimization. That’s the same problem space Brightfin’s Spend Clearly AI is built to solve at the IT-and-AI-spend layer, and it’s why we believe IT cost optimization is converging with managed mobility faster than most teams realize.

What this means for IT leaders: ask prospective providers for specifics. Where in your workflow does AI actually run? What does it automate? What’s the predicted savings or productivity lift? If a provider can’t answer in concrete terms, the AI is probably still in a slide deck.

3. Sustainability is no longer a “nice-to-have” line item

Gartner’s view: “The MMS market is now mostly aligning with sustainability goals, driven both by regulatory pressures and corporate responsibility but also end-user willingness to support such ambitions.”

The majority of profiled providers offer device recycling and reuse, energy-efficient operations, sustainable procurement support, and ESG reporting. Some are providing carbon calculators that cover both devices and services. If your organization has ESG commitments, your MMS provider needs receipts — carbon metrics, e-waste handling, certified disposal — not just a sustainability page on their website.

What this means for IT leaders: add ESG questions to your RFP. Specifically ask for carbon footprint reporting at the device level, repair-and-reuse rates, and certified disposal documentation.

4. SLAs aren’t enough anymore — XLAs and DEX are how outcomes get measured

This was one of the most striking shifts in the guide. Providers are moving from traditional service-level agreements (SLAs) to experience-level agreements (XLAs) and digital employee experience (DEX) frameworks. Per Gartner, some providers weight XLAs up to ~70% of customer health scores, using AI sentiment analysis, “Pulse Surveys,” and proactive telemetry to measure how the service feels — not just whether tickets closed on time.

Quantitative metrics still matter (call abandonment rates, rapid SLAs for device wipes), but the bigger story is integration: AI-driven sentiment + proactive telemetry + XLAs combine into a much truer picture of end-user experience than any single SLA dashboard can show.

What this means for IT leaders: renegotiate your contracts. Add XLAs alongside SLAs. Define what user-experience excellence looks like, and tie a meaningful portion of provider compensation to it.

5. Pricing is evolving — and the fine print matters more than the headline rate

Gartner notes that the most common MMS pricing model is still a fixed price per device per month, but the structure is shifting. Service desk support, once priced on incident rates and hours, is now usually priced per user. Implementation fees may be bundled or separated — sometimes waived for longer contracts. Some proposals combine fixed device fees with per-event costs (screen replacements, refreshes). Ruggedized environments are increasingly using gain-share models that tie compensation to measurable productivity or cost outcomes.

A few details worth catching before you sign:

North American MMS deals often include strict autorenewal clauses lasting up to 12 months.
Global contracts increasingly allow annual price adjustments — sometimes unrelated to inflation.
Standard payment terms are now typically 30 days, but they’re negotiable.
Exit/walk-away clauses for chronic SLA or XLA breaches are a safeguard worth fighting for.
The average MMS contract term sits between 24 and 36 months.

What this means for IT leaders: price isn’t service quality. Build a TCO model that includes per-event costs, refresh cycles, autorenewal exposure, and the cost of an underperforming provider — then negotiate the contract terms, not just the rate card.

Where Brightfin fits in the 2026 picture

Our portfolio spans the full mobile life cycle, leveraging software, managed services, and ServiceNow-native workflows — the same architectural choice that lets enterprise IT, finance, and HR teams work from a single system of record instead of stitching together yet another point tool.

We believe Gartner specifically calls out our focus on regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, manufacturing), our unified handling of BYOD and corporate-liable environments under one governance framework, and our partnership with TRG for comprehensive forward and reverse logistics — repair, storage, and secure end-of-life disposal.

How to actually use this report in your next sourcing cycle

Gartner outlines a 6-step sourcing process. We’d suggest treating it as a literal checklist:

Define requirements and objectives — and the stakeholders who care about each.
Assess the competitive landscape, including provider types beyond your incumbent.
Issue a comprehensive RFP that requests how providers deliver, not just what.
Evaluate capabilities, pricing, references, and exit clauses.
Conduct a pilot before you sign at scale.
Establish governance, roles, responsibilities, and performance metrics — SLAs and XLAs.

If you’re in the middle of an MMS evaluation right now, this is the framework. If you’re not, it’s worth a quarterly check-in against your current provider anyway.

brightfin spend clearly ai

Helen Domeck — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:03:12 GMT

New AI-powered optimization app delivers real-time visibility, cost reduction, and predictive forecasting as enterprise AI spending accelerates

ENGLEWOOD, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Brightfin, a leader in AI native IT cost optimization, today announced the launch of Spend Clearly AI, an intelligent optimization app purpose-built for enterprise technology leaders navigating the dual pressures of rising IT complexity and rapidly escalating AI investment.

As organizations race to deploy AI apps, models, and infrastructure, technology demands on the budget are expanding faster than ever and growing harder to track, justify, and control. The modern enterprise IT bill has become a moving target. Spend Clearly AI gives CIOs, CTOs, and IT finance teams a single, intelligent app to see exactly where every technology dollar is going, eliminate waste, and stay ahead of costs before they spiral.

“Stop thinking about IT as a cost problem. The goal isn’t just to spend less — the goal is to spend better,” said Joel Martins, CEO of Brightfin. “When you have real visibility and can trace every technology dollar to what it’s delivering, you stop cutting and start optimizing. CIOs who make that shift stop being seen as cost managers and start being seen as business architects.”

Spend Clearly AI delivers three core capabilities modern enterprises demand. First, full-spectrum visibility unifies IT and AI spend into a single consolidated view, eliminating the blind spots that drive budget overruns. Second, intelligent cost optimization continuously identifies underutilized services, inefficient AI model consumption, and wasteful contracts, surfacing actionable savings automatically. Third, predictive spend forecasting uses AI-driven modeling to anticipate future costs based on usage trends, AI adoption curves, and organizational growth, so teams can plan proactively rather than react to surprises.

Ready to see what’s really driving your IT and AI spend? Join us live on May 28th for a hands-on webinar demo of Spend Clearly AI — where you’ll see firsthand how IT and finance teams can ask plain-language questions and get instant, actionable budget insights without writing a single query or pulling a single report. Spots are limited, so reserve your seat today and take the first step toward smarter, clearer IT financial management.

Brightfin Unifies Brand Following Proven Optics Merger

Jacob Mollohan — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:43:51 GMT

Brightfin Unifies Brand Following Proven Optics Merger, Delivering a New Standard for Technology Cost Optimization

New identity reflects expanded vision to help CIOs “See Clearly. Spend Better.”

[Englewood, Colorado] – April 2, 2026 – Brightfin today announced that, following its merger with Proven Optics, the combined company will operate under a single brand: Brightfin. The unified company brings together deep expertise in Technology Expense Management (TEM) and IT Financial Management (ITFM) to help organizations better understand, manage, and reduce total technology spend.

Technology spending will exceed $6 Trillion this year, and for most organizations, it remains one of the least understood. CIOs can tell you what they’re spending. Far fewer can tell you whether it’s working.

“Over the past several months, we’ve brought these two businesses together around a shared purpose: help enterprise businesses better understand and optimize their technology spend,” said Joel Martins, CEO of Brightfin. “What we are seeing now is a shift. Visibility alone isn’t enough. Teams need to be able to act, tied to real financial outcomes. See Clearly. Spend Better. That is our north star, and that is what our platform is built to deliver.”

To support this shift, Brightfin brings together Technology Expense Management and IT Financial Management into a single platform that connects cost data across telecom, mobile, cloud, and enterprise IT. “Spend Better” means re-directing your investments from areas of lower priority to higher priority, and do it quickly and effectively.

Brightfin helps organizations identify and eliminate technology spend, dollars that can then be used to fund strategic priorities. In one example, a customer achieved $9 million in cost reductions ahead of schedule. In another, a global organization used Brightfin to allocate $14.8 million in technology chargebacks to finance on time, with full transparency into how costs were distributed across the business. While cost reductions reflect direct savings, chargebacks represent the accurate allocation of technology spend across departments, giving finance a clear and defensible view of where every dollar resides.

The platform enabled a more transparent and repeatable approach to cost allocation, reducing manual effort and strengthening alignment between IT, Finance, and the broader organization.

“The cost model has allowed greater transparency into infrastructure costs and has been the mechanism by which we are able to demonstrate the benefits of the TBM framework,” said a leading health insurance provider. “It laid the foundation for service owners and business leaders to ask more tactical questions and be provided levers to better realize IT value.”

The traditional Software Development Lifecycle, long the backbone of enterprise technology delivery, is giving way to an AI-driven development lifecycle, where artificial intelligence is embedded into every stage of how software is designed, built, tested, and deployed.

Brightfin is at the forefront of this shift.

As the world’s first AI-Native Cost Optimization Partner for enterprise businesses, Brightfin leverages AI not as an add-on, but as the foundation of how the platform works. Every customer engagement generates proprietary data that feeds a compounding flywheel, making the platform smarter, faster, and more precise over time. Brightfin doesn’t just give organizations the tools to manage technology spend. It owns the outcome.

This focus on outcomes is central to how Brightfin helps organizations reduce total technology spend and operate more efficiently. As technology becomes easier to build and automate, the real differentiator is not the tool itself, but the results it delivers.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” Just Turned Telecom Into a Financial Flashpoint - brightfin

Helen Domeck — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:19:22 GMT

Healthcare IT leaders have spent years navigating tight budgets. That challenge has taken on a new level of urgency.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to remove nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid funding over the next decade, the largest reduction in the program’s history. The impact is already showing up across health systems. Service lines are being reduced, and investment plans are being reconsidered as financial leaders reassess priorities with far less room for error.

Millions of patients rely on Medicaid coverage today. Hospitals depend on it as well—nearly one-fifth of all hospital spending is tied to Medicaid reimbursements. When that funding shifts, the consequences move quickly through the system.

Uncompensated care is expected to rise sharply. By 2034, providers could be absorbing an additional $31 billion annually in unpaid care. At the same time, hospitals are projected to lose at least $24 billion in revenue each year as coverage declines.

For mid-sized hospitals, those macro trends translate into real operating pressure, often between $500,000 and $2 million in lost revenue annually.

Under this kind of strain, every expense is being reviewed more closely. Telecom, which has traditionally operated in the background, is now drawing attention.

The Cost Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Telecom has quietly grown into one of the least understood areas of IT spend. Invoices move through accounts payable with limited review, services accumulate across departments over time, and contracts renew without a clear picture of actual usage. When leadership asks for a breakdown of telecom costs, the answer often requires pulling data from multiple systems.

This lack of visibility is common across healthcare organizations. The financial stakes are rising alongside that complexity. As coverage declines, hospitals face a dual impact: reduced reimbursement and increased uncompensated care.

Research shows that when Medicaid coverage drops, hospital revenues fall while unpaid care costs climb significantly. In practical terms, that means dollars lost on the revenue side and additional costs showing up elsewhere.

One healthcare system uncovered $400,000 in annual waste after taking a closer look at telecom spend. Three departments were paying for similar services without realizing it. No centralized view existed to highlight the overlap.

Situations like this are more common than most organizations expect. In a tighter financial environment, they become much harder to absorb.

Turning Visibility Into Action

Telecom spend can play a much more active role in financial planning when the right data is in place. Clear cost allocation gives IT leaders a way to show exactly where telecom dollars are going. That level of transparency supports more informed decisions at the executive level, especially when budgets are under pressure.

Chargeback models help make this possible. When costs are tied directly to the departments using the services, financial ownership becomes clearer. IT budgets begin to reflect actual consumption, and departments gain visibility into their own usage patterns.

This shift often leads to immediate improvements. Organizations identify unused services, duplicate contracts, and inefficiencies that had gone unnoticed. In many cases, this results in meaningful cost recovery—often between $1 million and $3 million within the first cycle.

At a time when hospitals are facing billions in lost revenue and rising uncompensated care costs, recovering even a fraction of that internally can make a measurable difference.

Why Timing Matters

The financial changes tied to the bill are already taking effect. Coverage losses are expected to push millions of Americans out of Medicaid, increasing the number of uninsured patients seeking care.

As that happens, hospitals absorb more of the cost.

Across the country, hospitals are projected to take on hundreds of billions in additional uncompensated care over the next decade . Rural and mid-sized systems are particularly exposed, with many already operating on thin margins.

Organizations that move quickly have more flexibility in how they respond. Those that wait often face sharper tradeoffs—cutting services, delaying investments, or reducing staff.

Building visibility into telecom spend does not require a long timeline. Many organizations can establish a working chargeback model in 45 to 60 days, creating clarity ahead of critical budget discussions.

A Shift in How IT Contributes

Greater cost transparency changes how IT participates in financial conversations.

When leadership has access to reliable, detailed data, IT becomes a key contributor to planning and decision-making. The ability to explain spending at a granular level builds confidence across the organization and supports more disciplined financial management.

This kind of insight carries weight in the current environment, where every department is being asked to justify its spending and demonstrate value.

The Takeaway

Telecom has been part of healthcare operations for years, though it has rarely been examined closely. That is changing.

The financial impact of Medicaid cuts is already reshaping how hospitals think about cost, revenue, and accountability. With billions in lost funding and rising uncompensated care, overlooked expenses are becoming priorities.

The data needed to understand telecom spend already exists within most organizations. Bringing that data together allows leaders to recover costs, improve visibility, and make better decisions at a time when precision matters more than ever.

For healthcare IT leaders facing increasing pressure, this represents a practical opportunity to strengthen financial control and support the organization’s broader response to ongoing disruption.

$14.8M Delivered on Time: Why Modern Chargeback Starts With Clarity - brightfin

Jacob Mollohan — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:07:32 GMT

IT spend is rising, and so is the need for clarity

Enterprise technology spend continues to rise, and so does the pressure to explain it. Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending will reach $6.15 trillion in 2026, up 10.8% from 2025, while worldwide AI spending is expected to total $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44% year-over-year increase.

Organizations are not only investing more in technology overall. They are also investing more aggressively in AI. That combination creates a new challenge for IT and Finance leaders. It is no longer enough to simply manage invoices or allocate costs after the fact. As environments become more complex, organizations need a clearer way to understand spend, connect it to business consumption, and use AI to drive faster, better outcomes.

Deloitte’s recent enterprise AI research points to the same reality: companies are moving beyond experimentation and focusing more directly on ROI, operational value, and scaling AI into real business processes.

Why billing and chargeback have become strategic

This is where billing and chargeback become strategic.

For many organizations, chargeback is still too manual, too slow, and too difficult to defend. Finance needs accurate numbers on a fixed deadline. IT needs to explain the bill in business terms. And teams often end up reconciling disconnected data, validating service consumption, and answering avoidable questions after reports are delivered.

Modern chargeback should do more than push costs out to the business. It should create trust in the numbers, strengthen accountability, and help leaders make smarter spending decisions.

The role Brightfin is built to play

Brightfin’s billing capabilities are built to help organizations simplify telecom and technology billing, support flexible chargeback models, and allocate IT services and expenses to the right departments with more precision and less manual effort. The platform supports fixed, cost-based, and cost-plus pricing approaches, helping teams move from billing complexity to a more transparent and repeatable cost allocation model.

This is not just about making billing easier. It is about creating a stronger operational foundation for Finance, IT, and the business as a whole.

A real-world outcome that proves the value

One customer outcome brings that value into focus.

This month, the organization delivered just over $14.8 million in chargeback and got it to Finance by their target date.

That result matters because it reflects more than process completion. It reflects business alignment. Finance received the information it needed on time. IT delivered a bill the organization could act on. And the broader business got a clearer view of how technology costs were being distributed and managed.

That is what modern chargeback should look like.

The real problem is not the math

The real challenge in billing and chargeback is rarely the math. It is the operating model behind it.

When billing data is fragmented across systems, when service definitions are inconsistent, and when allocation logic depends on manual workarounds, the process becomes reactive. Teams spend too much time assembling reports and not enough time improving the business.

That is why the conversation needs to shift from features to outcomes.

From features to outcomes

Organizations do not need more complexity layered on top of already complex environments. They need an AI-Native platform that helps them move faster, see clearly, and act with more confidence. They need technology services that do not just surface data, but help turn data into outcomes the business can measure.

In billing and chargeback, those outcomes are clear. Teams can deliver information to Finance more quickly, improve confidence in cost allocation, create more transparency for business stakeholders, and reduce the manual effort spent reconciling and defending the bill.

That is the difference between a billing process that simply functions and one that creates real business value.

Why this matters even more in an AI-driven environment

A strong chargeback model also creates a stronger foundation for what comes next.

As AI becomes more embedded in enterprise operations, organizations need cleaner cost data, clearer service relationships, and more trusted financial outputs. AI can help accelerate insight and action, but only if the underlying billing and cost model is reliable enough to support it.

As spend continues to grow, that urgency only increases.

What this customer story really shows

The customer story here is powerful because it proves the point in business terms.

Not because billing functionality was added.
Not because another dashboard was created.
Not because a feature was delivered.

Instead, the result was simple and measurable: more than $14.8 million in chargeback was delivered to Finance on time.

That is the outcome.

And that is how modern IT billing should be measured.

More than visibility

As IT and AI investment continue to grow, organizations need more than visibility. They need clarity, accountability, and a faster path from raw cost data to business action. Brightfin helps make that possible by bringing billing and chargeback into a model built for transparency, repeatability, and real financial outcomes. Because in the end, the goal is not just to produce a bill. It is to help the business understand its technology spend, optimize it, and move forward with confidence.