What a CFO should ask before the next AI renewal
Fritz DesirManaging Partner · Strategic Design
A renewal is a decision, not a formality — these five questions make it a defensible one.
Most AI renewals are approved the way they were last year: quickly, and on faith. But a renewal is a fresh decision to spend, and it deserves the same scrutiny as the original purchase. Five questions turn it from a gut call into a defensible one.
The five questions
Ask each of these — and refuse to approve until you have an answer backed by data, not anecdote.
- How many seats are actually being used — not provisioned, used — in the last 90 days?
- What does this tool overlap with? Are we paying two vendors for the same capability?
- What did it change? Point to a metric, a baseline and a target — not a feeling.
- What’s the real all-in cost, including the seats hiding on personal cards and cloud bills?
- What happens if we don’t renew? If no one can answer, that’s your answer.
Why it works
None of these questions are clever. They’re just rarely asked at renewal, when the path of least resistance is to click approve. Asking them does two things: it kills spend that no longer earns its place, and it forces every tool to re-justify itself on evidence.
That’s the difference between governing AI spend and simply paying for it.
