Picture your company’s software stack as a suburban garage. Once upon a time you parked one sensible sedan in there.
Now? You can’t find the sedan because it’s buried under three treadmills, a broken drum kit, and twelve boxes labeled “MISC.”
Welcome to SaaS sprawl. It’s messy, it’s expensive, and—spoiler alert—it’s where your AI budget is hiding.
The Cluttered Truth
- 112 SaaS apps is now the average corporate collection. Enterprises with ambition (or a shopping problem) run closer to 275.
- Nearly half those licenses never get clicked. They sit there like ghost profiles on a dating app—costing you real money while delivering absolutely no joy.
- Totals add up quickly: benchmark reports peg $18 – $21 million a year in pure “zombie license” waste for a mid-large org. That’s not a rounding error; that’s head-count.
Meanwhile… in AI Land
Your CIO is declaring 2025 “The Year of Enterprise AI.”
Translation: We need GPUs, copilots, fancy-pants LLM add-ons, and we need them yesterday.
But there’s a catch: CFOs have rediscovered the word “reallocation.”
Cue the budget scavenger hunt. Guess which line item looks juicy?
Yep: those unused SaaS seats.
Five Steps to Reclaim the Loot
- Audit or Die
Pull usage logs, shine a flashlight, and mark every tool with <50% seat utilization. Think of it as “Marie Kondo: SaaS Edition.” Does this license spark joy? No? Trash bin. - Merge the Evil Twins
You do not need three wikis, two document-approval apps, and a rogue Airtable for “special projects.” Consolidate before your team files an HR complaint titled “Too Many URLs.” - Shake Down Your Vendors Quarterly
Annual renewals? Adorable. Try 90-day checkpoints. Vendors hate it; your finance team will love you. - Automate Everything That Moves
A single, automated approval workflow can replace half a dozen point tools. Bonus: fewer Slack pings asking, “Where’s the latest version?” - Fund an AI Pilot with the Spoils
Present the reclaimed dollars to leadership like a game-show host: “Behind Door #1—budget for that Gen-AI proof-of-concept we keep day-dreaming about!”
Enter Artefact, Stage Left
Artefact is the “giant garage-sale” solution: we collapse docs, comments, and approvals into one searchable workspace, cutting tool overhead and context-switching by about a million brain cells per week (OK, 30% in real-people math).
Use Artefact, and:
- Your license line shrinks.
- Your approval cycle stops moon-walking.
- You finally have cash for those shiny AI projects.