As a business user, you’ve found Alteryx One to be irreplaceable for your daily workflows. It lets you quickly pull in data from multiple enterprise systems, prepare that data for analysis and a variety of AI use cases, and quickly spin up models and orchestrate agents using natural language. In essence, Alteryx helps you answer your burning questions.
Its value seems straightforward, so why does it sometimes feel so difficult to communicate that value to your IT team?
Enterprise IT teams care about solving your pain points. Features and ROI are important to them too. But so are things that may not be immediately evident. Things like security, total cost of ownership (TCO), governance, and auditability. In this blog, we’ll show you how to translate the business value of Alteryx One to your IT team in a way that sticks. But first, it will require better understanding your closest organizational ally.
“We have budget, so why is adoption so difficult?”
First, some context. Global IT spend grew by 14% in 2025, locking in the largest jump in spending since the launch of Windows 95 in 1996, when Internet adoption was digitally transforming the world. Gartner predicts another year of double-digit increases in 2026 (10.8%), with generative AI spend growing by a whopping 80.8%.
If you work in a large organization, the good news is there’s likely budget for a new AI-powered solution. However, that’s only half the story. Nearly everyone is using AI. And everyone wants their piece of the AI 𝞹.
NVIDIA’s 2026 series of State of AI reports found that companies with more than 1,000 employees had just 2% of respondents not using AI. In other words, 98% of employees are using AI-powered solutions. Your team isn’t the only one vying for a new software. For IT to grant you their approval, your request will have to pass a specific set of criteria.
What IT really wants
IT teams manage hundreds of moving parts. Servers, systems, software, logs, you name it. If something breaks, it can have ripple effects across the organization. And IT already has its hands full. One 2025 study found that technical support teams see an average of 10,675 support tickets a month.
IT leaders and teams have a long list of concerns that overlap with business teams in many ways (like features and ROI), but they also have concerns that sit within the opposite side of a Venn Diagram. Here’s a closer look at what your IT team cares about so you can better tailor your request for a new AI-powered solution.
Strategic alignment
Everyone in the organization is driving toward the business’s ultimate vision. What is leadership’s overarching strategy? Once you grasp that, you’ll have a good sense of IT’s priorities. In this case, try to get a sense of how your organization is trying to adopt and expand AI usage, then use that specific language in your business case.
The business litmus test
IT teams want to know they’re adopting the best solution at the best price. Is the solution you found solving a real business problem? Have you looked at competitors? Have you evaluated features and cost? Make sure to do your homework for your IT team to help reduce friction.
Fast time to value
When you buy a software license, you start paying as soon as you sign, but it can take months to deploy a piece of software. IT wants to know how long it will take to start seeing value and whether any expensive professional services or licenses are needed. All of these things factor into the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Low total cost of ownership (TCO)
IT cares about ROI. However, that’s just one dimension of total cost of ownership. TCO also factors in upfront and ongoing costs, such as administrative costs and the time it takes to train new employees on specialized software.
Platforms
New technology has to jump through a lot of hoops: legal, finance, and IT. It also has to connect with your other solutions (interoperability). The good news is that once platforms are approved and integrated into your tech stack, they provide exponential value because vendors are constantly expanding their available features. Alteryx, for example, embeds AI-guided capabilities that are always updating and innovating. When new features go online, adoption is instantaneous. ROI automatically increases, as users don’t have to pay for new features or go through the rigmarole of adoption if they already have a license.
Scalability
Can a technology click into your existing infrastructure and work at scale? Does it offer extensibility (can features be added to or work seamlessly with and around your solution)? Features matter, but only up to a point. IT may say no to a new solution if it can’t scale across a team or business.
Security and governance
IT is ultimately responsible for the digital safety of your organization. Phishing attempts, bad actors, social engineering, and more jeopardize that safety. With the average breach incurring $4.4 million in costs, IT teams must feel confident a new solution will keep your and your customers’ data safe.
Alteryx One: The Logic Layer
Infographic: Where the Logic Layer Fits in Modern Data Stacks
So, how does Alteryx fit into IT’s priorities? Alteryx One is a self-service analytics and automation platform that helps you create AI-ready data at scale. It can help you:
- Connect to data wherever it lives
- Clean and analyze data
- Automate end-to-end analytics processes
- Build predictive and prescriptive models without any code
- Ask your data sets questions in natural language
- Orchestrate AI agents
- And more
Let’s break down some of these features and why they’re important to IT, and look at other dimensions of Alteryx One that make it appealing to enterprise IT teams.
Connect to IT-approved systems. Access and analyze data at scale.
Alteryx syncs up with all major cloud data platforms — AWS, Databricks, Snowflake, and more — and your enterprise systems, like your CRM, ERP, and other cloud platforms (interoperability). This connectivity allows you to access the data you need for fast and easy cleaning and blending. Even better, Alteryx helps you access cloud data without writing custom code or complicated SQL queries. Then, you can use that data for analysis, modeling, or for generative and agentic AI use cases with any frontier model (extensibility).
Reduce support tickets. Make better decision-making automatic.
IT’s bandwidth is limited. The good news is that once you build a workflow in Alteryx, you can automate it forever. Whether it’s a monthly report or an agentic analytics use case, Alteryx helps business users build end-to-end analytics workflows so that IT doesn’t have to create custom, ad-hoc solutions every time a business user wants a new report or dashboard (scale and ROI). The result is fewer tickets for IT and faster analytics for business users.
Adopt self-service without losing control
With built-in data lineage, IT gains complete visibility into how data is accessed, moved, and transformed. With LiveQuery, data stays in the cloud and isn’t moved onto your desktop. Pushdown Processing in Alteryx also allows you to take advantage of the cloud’s compute power for faster analytics (speed and scale). All of these features allow IT to audit data usage and ensure they’re staying in compliance with regulatory requirements and enterprise policies.
Manage access with enterprise-grade governance
Alteryx has governance built in, including granular access controls so only the right people can view or change data, audit logs so teams can trace what happened and when, version control so workflow changes are visible and recoverable, and encryption for data at rest and in transit. Alteryx even uses standardized authentication methods like SAML (user verification) and OAuth (app permissions) so IT can manage access consistently across systems.
Protect your data
Alteryx has SOC2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications. What are those? Soc 2 Type II shows that things like Alteryx’s security, availability, confidentiality, and privacy were designed effectively and have worked well for a substantial period of time. ISO 27001 is a certification that means Alteryx meets an international standard for information security management. Together, they mean that Alteryx takes protecting your data seriously.
We also deeply believe in responsible and ethical AI. If your IT team has any questions about what types of AI we use or how we use it, our AI Fact Sheets and FAQ are great starting points.
Feel confident in your AI systems with VURA
The VURA framework is an acronym we developed and use at Alteryx to ensure our AI tools are consistent and accurate. Its four facets are non-negotiable. VURA stands for:
- Visible: In AI systems and workflows, there must be clear transparency into where data comes from and how it’s changed.
- Understandable: Anyone should be able to understand AI’s outputs and the logic behind them.
- Repeatable: The same prompts and processes should produce consistent, reliable results that can be documented and scaled.
- Auditable: Teams need to be able to trace decisions, review prompts, identify ownership, and hold both systems and people accountable when something goes wrong.
Checklist: How to talk about Alteryx One’s value with IT
Now that you have a better understanding of Alteryx One’s value in IT’s language, here’s your real-world checklist.
Step 1: Understand IT’s priorities: What is your organizational leadership saying about AI adoption? What is IT’s overall strategy in light of leadership’s mandate? Understanding this context will help you build a strong business case.
Step 2: Do your homework: Be ready to explain the business case for Alteryx, including why current tools aren’t enough, what alternatives you looked at (and how much they cost), and how Alteryx fits into your organization’s existing tech stack.
Step 3: Show the path to value: Explain how quickly Alteryx can be deployed (it downloads in minutes and browser access just requires an account) and can start generating value (minutes to hours).
Step 4: Build confidence: Provide evidence for why Alteryx is trustworthy for your data and your customers’ data. You can point your IT team toward our governance and security pages, in addition to our AI FAQ.
Step 5: Be ready for pushback: IT teams have your and the organization’s best interests at heart. However, that means they’ll probably have questions. Lots of them. Use our objection handling sheet as a starting point for common concerns.
Alteryx One: Where business value and IT priorities meet
IT and business teams don’t have to be disconnected. While your goals may feel different, the biggest distinction lies in how you view the AI-powered tools that will help your organization achieve them.
Alteryx One helps business users of any skill level analyze data faster, automate time-consuming processes, and reduce strain on IT teams, all in a way that is governed, secure, and trustworthy. When talking to IT, that’s the message that sticks.
Learn more about Alteryx for IT or get our toolkit for talking to your boss about Alteryx.