How SMEs can avoid wasting budget on underused AI subscriptions
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
AI subscriptions are quietly eating SME budgets alive.
Monthly, small businesses buy Copilot seats, ChatGPT plans, AI add-ons that nobody uses. The invoice comes due. Licenses collect dust. CFO’s begin inquiries.
Here’s the problem:
The majority of SMEs purchase AI solutions without validating either the need or the user. You end up with a silent drain on your IT spend accumulating into thousands of dollars per quarter.
The good news? It can be fixed.
Learn how a multi-tenant assessment solution allows SMEs (and MSPs who service SMEs) to end subscription sprawl for AI services they never use.
What you’ll uncover:
- Why SMEs waste so much on AI subscriptions
- What is a multi-tenant sssessment tool?
- How to spot underused AI licences
- 5 practical ways to stop wasting budget
Let’s jump in!
Why SMEs waste so much on AI subscriptions
AI tools seem inexpensive on paper. Then you multiply by 50 employees. Then again by 12 months. Then you throw Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT Teams and a handful of productivity bots on top.
Here’s what usually happens:
- IT buys licences for “the whole team” to be fair
- A small group uses them daily
- Most users forget the tools exist
- Nobody audits the spend until renewal
That last one is the killer. Before you know it, you’ve spent an entire year’s budget on chairs nobody sits in.
Research revealed that enterprises wasted over $104 million on unused technology in 2024. Smaller budgets make SMEs feel that pain more quickly.
The hidden cost?
Lost time. If you purchased AI to make employees more efficient and they aren’t utilizing it, you’re essentially paying double. You paid for the licence, and then you lost the time savings you didn’t get.
That’s where a Microsoft Copilot readiness assessment can help. Prior to deploying AI subscriptions to SME customers or departments wide, a readiness assessment will highlight which users, tenants, and environments are ready to succeed. Run a multi-tenant assessment tool to get visibility prior to those invoices coming in.
What is a multi-tenant assessment tool?
Multi-tenant assessment tool is defined as a tool/application/software which assesses/scans, measures and reports across multiple Microsoft 365 tenants (client environments) from a single view/console/dashboard.
In plain English?
It allows you to view activity for all of your customers – or all of your business units – simultaneously. No more logging into 30 different portals to see who is doing what.
For an MSP with dozens of SME customers, this is gold. For an SME with multiple offices across the globe, this is the only way to identify waste.
A good multi-tenant assessment tool will show you:
- Which users have AI licences assigned
- Which users are actually using them
- Which tenants are ready for Copilot rollout
- Where security gaps could block AI deployment
- How spend compares against actual usage
Pretty cool, right?
This sort of visibility is knowing vs guessing. Guessing in AI can be very costly.
The real scale of AI subscription waste
Want to know how bad the waste really is?
Surprisingly low industry usage rates reveal that only 35.8% of Copilot seats are used on a regular basis. This means that nearly two-thirds of organisations who purchase Copilot are not seeing any significant benefit.
Two thirds. Of the spend. Gone.
Translate that into an SME purchasing 25 Copilot seats at ~$30 each per month. Approximately $5,400 per year going down the drain on seats that nobody logs into.
Scale that out to 50 SME customers in an MSP’s portfolio. Scary numbers, real quick.
A multi-tenant reporting tool is no longer a “nice to have”. It’s the only way to have visibility into AI spend across multiple tenants.
How to spot underused AI licences
So how do you find these underused licences before they drain your budget?
You need data, not guesses. Here’s the simple process most SMEs and MSPs miss:
Step 1: Get a baseline
Use a multi-tenant assessment tool to scan every tenant. Record:
- Total AI licences assigned
- Total active users (last 30 days)
- Average usage per active user
You can’t fix what you don’t measure.
Step 2: Set a usage threshold
Define what “active” really means for your organization. A baseline for Copilot is probably 5 substantive interactions per month. If they’re not hitting that mark, they should be recycled.
Step 3: Flag the quiet seats
If someone has been below your threshold for 60 days they get flagged. These are the seats costing you money with nothing to show for it.
Step 4: Reassign or remove
Prior to renewal, eliminate seats assigned to users that would never take advantage of them — or stop renting them altogether. A multi-tenant assessment tool streamlines this into a few-clicks process.
5 practical ways to stop wasting budget on AI subscriptions
Five things you can do this week to begin taking your AI budget back.
1. Run a tenant-wide audit
Don’t audit clients one at a time – it’s too time-consuming. Utilize a multi-tenant assessment tool that extracts usage from all environments in a single report.
2. Match licences to roles
Copilot isn’t for everyone. Knowledge workers, finance teams, and exec assistants see the biggest wins. Frontline workers usually do not.
Match licences to roles, not headcount.
3. Build a readiness gate
Perform a readiness check prior to issuing any new AI licence. If the environment, permissions or data structure aren’t ready for the user, the licence will go unused.
Spend the 10 minutes upfront. Save the 12 months of waste.
4. Review quarterly, not annually
Yearly evaluations allow you to identify waste only once per year. Quarterly evaluations allow you to identify it four times — and capture four times more budget.
5. Train, then re-measure
Occasionally the license isn’t the issue — the user just doesn’t know how to enable it. Hold brief training classes, then monitor to see if use increased. If not? Decommission the license.
Bringing it all together
AI subscriptions can be the greatest productivity booster or budget hemorrhage. Visibility is the key difference.
If you don’t have a multi-tenant assessment tool, you are operating in the dark. You have no visibility into who is consuming what, who is ready to move forward and where your dollars are truly going.
With one in place, you can:
- Spot underused licences quickly
- Reassign or cancel before renewal
- Match AI subscriptions to actual users
- Prove ROI on every dollar spent
It’s the difference for SMEs — and the MSPs who support them — between AI as a smart investment, or a slow, pricey mistake.
Rule of thumb? Don’t purchase AI subscriptions thinking someone will magically have time to use them. Assess, then assign. Your wallet will appreciate it.