By: Natalie Johnson
Every downturn produces the same corporate reflex: freeze hiring, defer purchases, squeeze the biggest vendors, and report the savings. And every recovery reveals the same result, which is that the money came back. Bomsi Billimoria, who leads EvoXvantage, argues that most of what passes for cost management in large enterprises is number-crunching dressed up as strategy, and that the distinction matters more now than it has in years, because chief financial officers (CFOs) are being told to cut costs and invest in artificial intelligence (AI) at the same time. The two mandates look like opposites on a budget sheet. Billimoria’s case is that they are not, and that the organizations treating them as a trade-off are the ones most likely to get both wrong.
Subtraction Versus Redesign
The test Billimoria applies is simple and unforgiving. “Cutting costs is subtraction. You freeze a budget, delay a purchase, or renegotiate a rate, and the dollar comes off the P&L this quarter,” he says. “Transformation is redesign. It asks why the spend exists in its current shape at all, and it changes the operating model, the resourcing, and the controls so the cost does not simply reappear next year in a different line item.” That reappearance is the tell. He has watched organizations run three or four rounds of across-the-board cuts and finish exactly where they started, because nobody touched the process generating the spend in the first place.
The consequence for how finance teams report savings is significant. A number that only exists because someone declined to spend money is not durable, and it carries no information about whether the underlying cost structure changed. Billimoria’s standard is a 12-month clock. “If a savings number cannot survive a year without another intervention, it was a cut, not a transformation.” Applied honestly, that rule would disqualify a large share of the savings programs currently being presented to boards as structural improvement. It also puts the burden of proof where it belongs, on the person claiming the win rather than on the person questioning it.
Where The Money Hides
Finance leaders hunt for leakage in the wrong places. Attention gravitates toward the large, negotiated contracts, the ones with a signature, a renewal date, and a quarterly business review attached. Billimoria says that is precisely where the money is not. “It is in the invoices that never matched a contract in the first place, the auto-renewals nobody flagged ninety days out, the volume discount that was earned but never applied, and the vendor paid twice because two systems never talked to each other.” None of that surfaces in a governance meeting. It surfaces when someone reconciles the general ledger against invoices and contract terms, line by line, which most organizations lack the tooling or the headcount to do continuously.
So the leakage renews itself every billing cycle while executive attention stays fixed on the next big ticket negotiation. That is a structural failure rather than a diligence failure, and it explains why the same companies can run rigorous procurement functions and still bleed money. The diagnostic work Billimoria describes starts there. Week one pulls the ledger, the invoices, and the contracts into one place and reconciles them against each other, because the mismatch is where the findings live. The specifics can include an expired contract still invoiced at the old rate, a discount tier hit but never applied, and a vendor paid through two different cost centers. Findings like these can build trust and help fund the rest of the work. The slower part follows: fixing sourcing and approval workflows, tightening contract governance, and building the resourcing model that stops the drift. Recovery, in his definition, means invoiced credits and corrected billing rather than a projected figure.
Funding The Future With The Past
The budget tension defining this cycle is the one Billimoria hears in nearly every CFO conversation: simultaneously cutting costs and funding AI. Treating those as competing line items is the error. “It is to fund the second with the first,” he says. Recovered hard dollars from spend leakage, contract drift, and process waste are exactly the capital that should be redeployed into the AI initiatives the business wants. That reframes the diagnostic from a defensive exercise into a financing mechanism, and it gives the CFO an answer that does not require asking the board for new money.
The technology itself plays a specific and bounded role. “AI accelerates and experience governs,” Billimoria says, describing the premise behind his firm. AI can reconcile a volume of invoices, contracts, and ledger entries no team could process by hand, surfacing leakage far faster than manual review. “But someone with real operating experience still has to decide what to do with what it finds, because not every anomaly is a problem and not every discount is worth chasing.” That judgment layer is what separates a useful finding from an expensive distraction, and it is the part vendors selling automation tend to skip over.
Looking 12 to 18 months ahead, Billimoria expects spend management to shift from an annual exercise to a continuous one, because leakage does not wait for the audit calendar. Three things become table stakes: continuous reconciliation across ledger, invoices, and contract terms rather than point-in-time review; genuine scrutiny of auto-renewal clauses, which he calls one of the most common and most preventable sources of overspend; and board-level rigor applied to AI spend itself. What did it cost? What did it recover? Can you prove it? Those questions are coming. The organizations that will answer them well are the ones building the reconciled ledger and the centralized contract repository now, before anyone asks.
Billimoria shares more on cost transformation, vendor spend governance, and AI-enabled finance operations through his LinkedIn profile.
