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Coca-Cola bottlers’ Mark Dunkerley explains why token-based AI pricing has outrun the annual budget cycle and what its leaders should do about it

CLEVELAND, Ohio – September 16, 2026 – Computer hardware comes with a price tag you can see, but increasingly, the rest of the IT budget does not. In the newest episode of The Savvy CIO, hosted by Bradd Busick, Mark Dunkerley, VP of Enterprise Technology Services and CISO at Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Sales & Services, said, “I don’t think anybody knows how to calculate AI costs.”

Dunkerley, who supports nearly 60 Coca-Cola bottlers across North America, traces a 20-year arc in how hidden spend shows up. It began with, “I need a server, I need storage.” It moved to the cloud, where shadow IT and consumption costs are hard to govern even with a mature cloud team. Now it has moved again, and this time, he argues, the industry does not yet have the math.

That uncertainty collides with a planning process built for a slower era. Dunkerley makes the case that the three-year roadmap still has a role for lifecycle and technical debt work, but that no leader can credibly forecast AI three- to six-months out, which makes transparency with non-technical executives, reserved project budget, and strong business relationships the real controls. “Hidden spend,” he said, “is as much a governance problem as a finance one.”

The episode also pushes back on the assumption that AI is a shortcut past foundational work. Dunkerley points to two constraints no model resolves on its own – unreliable data and unexamined processes.

“AI is not going to fix bad data,” said Dunkerley. “Most organizations are still running off processes from years ago. If processes haven’t been optimized or reviewed to meet the current state of today, again, AI’s not going to fix that.”

For Busick, the through-line is proactive ownership. “These invisible bleeds aren’t going to sink you because they’re big,” he said. “They’re going to sink you because you forgot they were there at all.”

Both leaders land on the same prescription – bring data and facts to the executive table, shift accountability for risk and spend from a single CIO or CISO to the broader business, and treat governance, risk, and compliance as the mechanism that makes it stick.

The Savvy CIO is produced by Park Place Technologies and explores the budget pressures, AI adoption challenges, and security concerns facing today’s IT leaders, along with the people solving them every day.

Episode 5, “Managing the Spend You Can’t See,” is available now on Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

About Park Place Technologies
Park Place Technologies is a leading global IT infrastructure services firm with $1.2 billion in annual revenue and 3,000+ employees. We help 25,000+ organizations in 180 countries – including half the Fortune 500 – fuel innovation and accelerate AI transformation by dramatically reducing time and money spent on IT infrastructure management, while boosting performance and uptime.

Powered by the world’s largest on-the-ground engineering team, a robust group of advanced engineers, and our global Enterprise Operations Centers, Park Place delivers significant cost savings on hardware maintenance, software technical support, hardware procurement, and more. We also streamline IT infrastructure management, freeing internal teams from day-to-day tasks, enabling them to focus on strategic initiatives — including AI acceleration.

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Park Place Technologies
Michael Miller, Sr. Director of Global Communications
mmiller@parkplacetech.com

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