Most businesses can tell you how much they’re spending on AI tools, but do they know how much of that spend is actually being used?
We’re seeing it with our clients again and again. A business rolls out an AI tool across a team, or the whole business – licences bought, seats assigned, everyone set up on day one. Six months in, a small handful of people are getting real value out of it. Everyone else logged in once, poked around, and quietly went back to doing things the old way.
The licence is still being paid for either way. It’s the same story as a gym membership nobody uses. The cost isn’t really the monthly fee. It’s paying that fee for something that’s sitting there doing nothing. With AI tools, that waste is easy to miss, because it doesn’t look like waste. Nobody cancelled anything. Nobody complained. The tool is technically “in use” – it’s just that “in use” and “used well” turned out to be two very different things.
We think this is where many AI budgets are leaking value. It’s rarely the tool itself. Most of these platforms genuinely do what they say on the tin. The gap is what happens after go-live. Usage gets assumed rather than checked.
The businesses getting the most value out of AI look at the numbers: who’s logging in, who’s using it well, and how it is generating efficiencies. Then they act on it – more training where it’s needed, licences reallocated to the people who’ll use them, and the ones nobody’s touched cut.
It can be a tricky conversation to have as nobody loves admitting a tool they championed isn’t delivering how they hoped it would. But it’s a far cheaper conversation than automatically renewing fifty seats a year from now to find out forty of them were never opened. Smart use of AI involves making sure what you’re already paying for is actually earning its keep and treating “are we actually using this” as a normal question to keep asking, not an awkward one to avoid.
TAKEAWAY
If you have implemented an AI tool in your team, have you followed up on who’s using it? And for what? Are there tangible areas where it is actually making a difference?
Contact Lorraine at lorraine.oleary@barden.ie or on LinkedIn
