Fritz DesirManaging Partner · Strategic DesignApr 22, 2026 · 5 min read
The fastest-growing line item in most companies is the one no spreadsheet can see yet.
Shadow AI isn’t a security story first — it’s a budgeting story. Tools get expensed on personal cards, trialled by a single team, and renewed on autopilot long before procurement ever hears the vendor’s name. By the time finance sees the cost, the habit is already load-bearing.
Why it hides
Most AI spend doesn’t arrive through the channels finance watches. It shows up as a $20 seat here, a team subscription there, a cloud bill that quietly compounds. None of it is large enough to trip a threshold on its own — which is exactly why it accumulates.
3–5×
more AI tools are typically in use than the ones finance can name — most discovered only at renewal.
Finding it before the renewal does
The fix isn’t a crackdown, it’s visibility. Reconcile card statements, SSO logs and cloud spend against your known tool list, and the gap between what you think you’re running and what you’re actually paying for becomes obvious. Then you can make a decision — standardise, consolidate, or cut — instead of discovering the bill after it auto-renews.
That’s the whole point: you can’t govern what you can’t see, and you can’t budget for what you haven’t found.
Fritz DesirManaging Partner · Strategic Design
