What's New in AAI 26.0.0 — Cost Model and Data Insights

Products

• Automation Analytics & Intelligence

Issue/Introduction

AAI 26.0.0 adds Cost Model, a new area for tracking and allocating the cost of running jobs and schedulers, along with several new AI-assisted analysis and insight types.
Unlike the other upgrade topics in this set, this one isn't about something that changed under you during an upgrade — it's genuinely new functionality.
If you're looking for what breaks or moves during an upgrade instead, see What to Know Before Upgrading to AAI 26.0.0 (Additional Information).

New to AAI 26.0.0 upgrade terminology? This article assumes familiarity with terms used across this documentation set.
See: AAI Glossary — Terms Used in the 26.0.0 Upgrade Documentation

Environment

• AAI 26.0.0 and later.
• Cost Model and the new insight types are AAI application features, not deployment-model specific — they behave identically on VM/traditional-installer and Kubernetes/OpenShift.

Cause

Not applicable. This article describes new functionality, not a resolution to a specific reported problem.

Resolution

Summary

26.0.0 adds Cost Model — a new area for tracking and allocating the cost of running jobs and schedulers — along with several new AI-assisted analysis and insight types. This is the largest new functional area in the release.

What Cost Model is

Cost Model gives you a way to organize and track costs associated with running your automated jobs, built around three concepts:

• Cost Centers — organizational units for grouping costs, arranged in a hierarchy (a cost center can have parent and child cost centers, so you can roll costs up from a team level to a department level, for example).
  Every install starts with a single default, uncategorized cost center out of the box.
• Cost Ownership — individual cost records, each with a name, an amount, and a currency.
• Job Association Rules — rules that determine which cost center a given job's activity is attributed to, so you don't have to manually tag every individual job run yourself.

Together, these feed chargeback reporting — a summarized view of what's costing what, broken down by cost center.

Getting access to Cost Model

Cost Model is not turned on with a setting inside AAI itself — access is granted as a capability through your organization's identity and access management system (the same system that manages AAI login and permissions generally), not through an AAI admin screen.
If a user in your organization needs access and doesn't have it, your identity/access administrator is who grants it — not an AAI configuration change.

If you or a user navigate to Cost Model without this capability granted, you'll simply be sent back to the main dashboard with no error message or explanation. This is expected behavior for a missing capability grant, not a broken link or a bug
— see What to Know Before Upgrading to AAI 26.0.0 (Additional Information) for more on why this can look like something failed when it hasn't.

New AI-assisted insight types

Separately from Cost Model, 26.0.0 adds new types of automated insights, generated with AI assistance:

• AI Data Insight
• Chargeback Insight — works together with Cost Model above, surfacing cost-allocation data as an insight
• BAMP (Business Area Monthly Performance) — monthly job-stream performance data grouped by business area

These come with a new AI-assisted filter-building capability, making it easier to construct the underlying data filters these insight types use without writing them by hand.

Don't confuse this with the separate "Data Insight Builder" page covered in What to Know Before Upgrading to AAI 26.0.0 (Additional Information) — that's an existing interactive-analytics feature with its own, separate access setting;
Cost Model and the new insight types above are gated by the capability described in the previous section instead.

What this means for space/capacity planning

Cost Model's data accumulates continuously once it's in use — one record per cost center, per scheduler, per day.
This isn't a concern immediately after upgrading, but it's worth factoring into any 26.0.0 storage or capacity-planning conversation now, rather than being surprised by it months into using the feature.

Additional Information

• What to Know Before Upgrading to AAI 26.0.0 — background on the capability-gating behavior and why an ungranted feature can look like a broken link.
• Pre-Upgrade Checklist for AAI 26.0.0 — action items to take before upgrading, including capacity planning.
• To speak with a customer representative or a Support Engineer see Contact Support. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the respective region.