From £50k to £20k: How I Tamed the AI Subscription Chaos in a 120-Vendor Enterprise
In the modern enterprise, "AI-everywhere" has turned into a mess of technical debt, runaway costs, and security blind spots. If you're already juggling PLM, ERP, and MES systems competing for budget, the unchecked spread of AI subscriptions is a real threat to whatever governance model you've built.
This was a lesson learned through challenging circumstances while consolidating an AI stack across a vendor estate that had grown to 120 separate tools, part of a broader ~£5M technology budget covering everything from PLM and ERP to infrastructure and SaaS. The conclusion I kept coming back to: AI governance without vendor discipline is really just a policy document nobody follows. By the end of the exercise, we'd brought the annual AI subscription run-rate down from £50k to £20k without losing any real capability. Here's what that process taught me about where governance actually breaks.
Shadow AI creeps in department by department.
When...
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