Most businesses can tell you how much they are spending on AI tools, but few know how much of that spend is actually being used.
We are seeing it with our clients again and again. A business rolls out an AI tool across a team, or the whole business, with licences bought and seats assigned so everyone is set up from day one. Six months later, a small handful of people are getting real value out of it, while everyone else logged in once, poked around, and drifted back to doing things the old way.
The licence is still being paid for either way. It is much like a gym membership nobody uses: the real cost is not the monthly fee, but paying that fee for something that sits there doing nothing. With AI tools, that waste is easy to miss, because it does not look like waste. Nobody cancelled anything, nobody complained, and the tool is technically “in use”. It is 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 is rarely the tool itself, and most of these platforms genuinely do what they say on the tin. The gap is what happens after go-live, when usage gets assumed rather than checked.
The businesses getting the most value out of AI look at the numbers: who is logging in, who is using it well, and where it is actually generating efficiencies. Then they act on what they find, whether that means more training where it is needed, licences reallocated to the people who will use them, or seats nobody has touched cut altogether.
It can be a tricky conversation to have, as nobody loves admitting that a tool they championed is not delivering how they had hoped! But it is a far cheaper conversation than automatically renewing fifty seats a year from now, only to find that forty of them were never opened. Smart use of AI means making sure what you are already paying for is earning its keep, and treating “are we actually using this” as a normal question to keep asking rather than an awkward one to avoid.
TAKEAWAY
If you have implemented an AI tool in your team, have you followed up on who is 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
