AI Spend Audit

Audit AI spend and produce a one-page reallocation memo. Run two audits inside it. Flat-priced seats earn renewal through meaningful use. Metered work earns its budget through consumption tied to a named workflow and an owner.

What you need from the user

Ask for four things:

1. Source inventory. Pull AP and GL detail, corporate-card and reimbursement detail, SaaS contracts and renewals, cloud and model-provider invoices, SSO seat reports, and the automation inventory. Do not use employee expenses as the whole inventory. They only show the spend people submitted.
2. Flat-seat data. For each flat-priced AI plan, get the seat count, monthly cost, and a seat-level usage report. Ask for meaningful weekly activity where the vendor can provide it. Login data is a fallback, not proof of useful work.
3. Metered-work data. For APIs, credit packs, agent workloads, and enterprise plans with consumption billing, get the invoice and vendor usage export grouped by user, team, project, or workflow. Ask for the named workflow each material line supports and the person who owns the next bill.
4. Unmanaged work. Ask teams that run shared systems about scheduled tasks, agents, scripts, and routines that call a model. Include personal accounts used for company work. Record the owner, system touched, plan, monthly cost if known, and whether anyone can see its usage.

If they have a CSV or spreadsheet, ask them to paste or upload it. Work with whatever format they give you.

How to analyze the spend

Build one source inventory first. Mark every line as standalone, metered, embedded, or shadow or unmanaged. Then classify it as direct or indirect: would the cost disappear if the organization stopped delivering its product or service? Add the owner, monthly dollars, actual users, usage visibility, and the named workflow where one exists.

Audit flat seats

Use the seat-level report for flat workspace plans. Group seats into top ten percent, middle sixty percent, and bottom thirty percent by meaningful activity. The exact cutoffs are less important than the shape.

Calculate cost per active seat only for these fixed-price plans: monthly plan cost divided by seats with meaningful weekly use. Flag the bottom thirty percent for reallocation. If the data is thin, state that the recommendation is provisional instead of making up precision.

Treat bundled workspace AI as a seat allocation, not proof of adoption. Do not use market penetration to decide whether the organization’s own Copilot or Gemini seats stay. Its usage report decides.

Audit metered work

Do not divide a metered bill by monthly active users. Group consumption by team and user, then put each material line beside the named workflow it supports. A high-consumption user may be producing valuable work. A low-consumption workflow may still be worth retaining. The question is what the consumption bought.

Flag consumption with no owner, no project tag, or no named workflow. Separate a power user’s productive workload from a runaway script, repeated uncached context, or a job that costs more without changing the work. Recommend per-team and per-user limits where the plan supports them, plus a view that shows cost while the workflow runs.

Reconcile unmanaged work

Search expense and corporate-card records for major AI vendors. Reconcile every result against the source inventory. Add scheduled automations even before the organization decides whether to approve them. An automation people rely on cannot remain an unowned personal subscription.

Flag multi-year consumption commitments that have not run through a full quarter, enterprise agent platforms without a proven workflow, and flat seat pools distributed equally without a usage case. Do not force the portfolio into a percentage allocation rule. The right distribution follows the work and role mix.

What to output

Produce a one-page reallocation memo with these sections:

Current state. Two to three sentences: total monthly AI spend, number of tools, the flat-seat cost per active seat, metered consumption by team, and any spend or automations still unmanaged.

What to cut or reallocate. Specific flat seat blocks to remove or return to the pool, with dollar savings. Default to the bottom thirty percent of seats where the usage pattern supports it. Name the metered workflows to tune or stop separately; do not label a heavy meter user as shelfware merely because the bill is large.

What to consolidate or govern. Where flat plans overlap for the same population, retain the one with meaningful use. Keep more than one tool when different work calls for it. Name the unmanaged accounts and scheduled automations that need a business owner and a governed plan.

What to fund. Move flat-seat savings to people with meaningful use and to metered workflows whose output the organization can name. State the owner, team, workflow, and the measure that will show whether the next month of consumption paid for itself.

The number for your CFO. Three sentences they can use in the next budget conversation. Format: “We’re spending $X/month on AI: $Y in flat seats and $Z in metered work. Reallocating inactive seats frees $A/month; metered spend is concentrated in [teams] for [named workflows]. [N] scheduled automations remain unmanaged and will move to named owners and governed plans.”

Keep the memo direct.