AI Spend Is Spiralling — Here's How to Audit Yours This Month

Rippling, the US HR and payroll software firm, has just launched an AI Spend Console after its own AI bill spiralled by millions in a matter of months. The tool tracks exactly how much each employee and team spends on AI subscriptions and usage. It's a reaction to a wider problem now being called the 'Tokenpocalypse' — firms handing out AI seats and licences without any idea who's actually using them, or whether the spend is paying for itself.

For a UK SME owner, this matters more than it sounds. Most firms that have adopted AI over the past year did it seat-by-seat: a ChatGPT Plus licence here, a Copilot add-on there, maybe a specialist estimating or scheduling tool bolted onto the accounts package. None of it gets reviewed once it's set up. It just renews.

The worked example

Take a 20-person construction or parts firm. Say the office rolls out ChatGPT Plus at £20 a head a month for admin, estimating and quoting support — that's £400 a month, or £4,800 a year. Six months in, usage logs (if anyone's checked them) show only six of the twenty staff log in weekly. The other fourteen seats, costing £2,800 a year, are doing nothing but sitting on a card statement.

That's not a hypothetical. It's the exact pattern Rippling found internally before building its own tracker, and the same pattern reported anecdotally at firms like Accenture, where teams have been quietly told to rein in AI spend after usage outstripped any measurable return. The tools themselves aren't the problem — unmanaged rollout is.

The fix isn't complicated, and you don't need a dedicated console to do it. You need a monthly five-minute check: who's using what, and is it saving them real time on real jobs — quoting, scheduling, drafting, chasing paperwork. If it isn't, cancel it. If it is, double down and roll it out to the people who'd benefit but haven't been given access yet.

What to do this month

• List every AI subscription on the company card — tools, seats, add-ons.
• Check actual login/usage data for each one, not just the invoice.
• Cancel anything unused for 30 days running.
• Reassign freed budget to the two or three tools your team actually reaches for daily.
• Put a 90-day calendar reminder to repeat the check — AI tool pricing and usage both drift fast.

The hours AI saves are real. The margin it quietly eats when nobody's watching is just as real. Track both.