the average business is paying for 4.5 separate ai tools. most owners can name two of them.

the condition is that ai never entered the business as a decision. one person expensed a writing tool, ops added a meeting notetaker, marketing bought a second one that does the same job under a different name, and the average company now carries 4.5 paid ai tools inside 27 ai-touched apps, roughly a fifth of the entire software portfolio. the cost is bigger than the line items, because two thirds of it leaders were billed more than they expected this year off consumption pricing, average monthly ai spend is running about $85,500 and climbing 36 percent, and no single person owns the number that produced it. the consolidation everyone claims to be doing has also quietly reversed: apps per company are back up 11 percent and the rate at which companies actually cut tools fell from 14 percent to 5.

the fake fix is a software rationalisation initiative, which means a spreadsheet, a steering group, and a decision that lands next quarter after the renewals have already run. do the ten minute version this afternoon. open the card statement, filter for anything with ai in the name, and write beside each one what it does in four words. any line that shares a job with another line gets cancelled this week, and anything that survives gets a hard usage cap before the card goes back on it.