Vendor and Cost Review
What are we paying for, and twice?
Who asks
Renewal notices put this on the desk of the executive who has to answer for it, usually when two of them arrive for tools that appear to do the same job.
What we look at
Every AI line item gets pulled onto one page, including the ones expensed on a card rather than procured, and each is put on a common basis so that a per-seat tool and a per-token tool can be compared at all. From there the question is overlap: which capabilities are bought more than once, which departments are paying separately for the same thing, and which seats are provisioned to people who stopped using them. Contract terms are read alongside the price, because retention, logging, and the subprocessors in the path change what a tool is allowed to be used for and therefore what it is worth. The recommendation carries its reasoning, so it can be argued with.
What you get
Key deliverables
- A spend map covering every AI line item
- Redundancy findings, naming what is bought more than once
- A consolidation recommendation with the reasoning attached
- A risk rating per tool
What this does not cover
We do not negotiate with vendors or sit in the room when a contract is signed, and the recommendation goes to whoever owns that relationship. A spend map is also built from what is being paid for, which means the tools nobody pays for stay invisible to it. Free tiers and personal accounts are exactly what an Exposure Review turns up, so run that first if the question is really about what is in use.
What lands in the platform
The vendor catalog holds each tool with its cost normalized across vendors priced in different units, so the comparison that took a spreadsheet to build the first time is standing there when the next renewal comes up. Redundancy detection runs over that inventory whenever the cost analysis is opened, grouping tools by category and reporting where one department holds two or more in the same category. Each tool also carries the departments it is assigned to and the share of its cost allocated to each, so the question of who is actually paying for a tool has an answer in the record.
Next step
Pull your card and invoice lines for anything billed as software, and we will separate the AI spend out of them before the first call.