Blog 4 Ways to Slash IT Costs and Reclaim Time

Updating your technology is a must. Successful organizations are using Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and AI to stop wasting time and start doing more.

Your employees are your biggest strength. But in many organizations, talented people are stuck doing slow, manual work because their technology is at the end of its life and hard to use.

This slow pace is a strategic risk. Obsolete technology doesn’t just cost a lot of money; it makes workers unhappy and slows down the whole organization. To maintain momentum, leadership must confront the hidden costs of technological stagnation.

To win today, you need to use cloud and AI tools to help your people and place them at the center of your business strategy. By moving past old limits, you can get a great return on investment and turn reclaimed time into sustainable growth. Here are lessons learned from four organizations that did just that:

1. Boost agility with flexible cloud spend.

Moving from buying hardware to paying only for what you use in the cloud saves money and lets IT teams innovate instead of just maintaining infrastructure. Tailored Brands, the company behind Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, had a problem. Their data centers were maxed out for power and space, and their old gear was about to need a very expensive update.

Instead of buying more hardware, they worked with Insight to move to Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE). We helped them move their virtual machines (VMs) with a phased approach to lift, shift, and modernize their workloads. Our thorough data analysis helped sort VMs into migration waves to eliminate workload outages. We used smart tools like VMware HCX to move hundreds of VMs much faster than doing it manually.

By paying only for what they use in the cloud, Tailored Brands slashed their infrastructure costs by 40%. The IT team stopped worrying about old servers. Now, during big sales days like Black Friday, they use auto-scaling to automatically grow their compute capacity to handle more shoppers.

2. Use AI to empower, not replace.

AI can handle boring tasks, so your team can work faster. In the fast-moving adtech industry, Freestar employees were spending too much time searching through dozens of data systems, ad servers, and measurement partners. It could take days to find one answer across Jira, Confluence, and Google Workspace, which frustrated a team of nearly 200.

Freestar decided to deploy Gemini Enterprise, backed by Insight’s deep AI expertise and change management best practices. We helped them connect all their data to create a highly secure, single source of truth. Now, instead of just searching, AI gives them the exact answers they need instantly, synthesized in a unified interface.

Using AI, Freestar cut a two-hour sales lead-enrichment process down to just two minutes for a 60X improvement. Customer success managers also save 45 minutes every day because Gemini Enterprise summarizes their emails into a set of prioritized action items, giving them more time to focus on growing the company’s revenue.

3. Invest in training to maximize ROI.

New AI tools are great, but employees need training to use them well. BlackLine, a leader in finance automation solutions, had 70% of their company information trapped in unstructured data formats like PDFs, video transcripts, and audio files that they couldn’t easily search. They wanted a way to access this untapped knowledge to help their employees work faster without risking corporate security.

BlackLine adopted Gemini Enterprise. Insight helped them create a comprehensive change management strategy and roll out a multi-level training plan that resulted in a 99% adoption rate across 2,000 employees. This approach included a company-wide introduction, department-specific training focused on immediate value, executive workshops for high-impact use cases, individual coaching sessions, and a prompt-a-thon that drew 87 entries that can increase revenue, reduce churn, and improve profitability. By focusing on professional training, including prompt engineering and enterprise search, Insight excited and empowered BlackLine employees to uncover deeper insights from their data.

The results were huge: BlackLine is saving $200,000 a year on content creation and saved $200,000 on one-time product documentation translation costs, while doubling marketing output. Gemini Enterprise helps with writing proposals and answering questions, which saves every employee 15-20% of work time and about one day of work per week for 45% of the top users.

4. Drive adoption through understanding.

Success story: See how we built an automation solution for a grain distributor to improve delivery routes (reducing carbon emissions) and prevent food spoilage.

When people understand how new technology helps them, they are happy to use it. Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) provides healthcare to 150,000 Boston residents. Thousands of their old productivity software licenses were expiring, which was a budget nightmare to renew and a severe security risk due to zero-day vulnerabilities.

CHA worked with Insight to switch to Google Workspace. Insight’s change management initiative for CHA focused on work transformation, starting with deep dives and stakeholder interviews to understand actual workflows and hidden dependencies. We talked to the staff to see what they needed and gave them extra help during the move. We advocated for them and helped them switch from applications like Microsoft Excel to Google Sheets in a way that didn’t interrupt their work of helping patients.

Because we listened to the staff, the switch was a spectacular success. CHA drastically improved security, unified workflows, and slashed 4,300 expensive software licenses. In fact, they saved much more money than their budget projected and used those savings to focus on their main goal: saving lives.

Elevating the human element in operations

For these four organizations, it wasn’t just about the money. It was about making the workplace a better, more trusting place. They are all more agile and have boosted the meaningful work of their employees. By using the cloud and AI, their teams can stop doing boring tasks and spend their energy on work that really matters.

Don’t let aging infrastructure, fragmented data, or inefficient workflows hold your company back. Contact Insight today. We can help you build a plan to slash your costs and get your time back.