Pull up your AI spend for last quarter. You can probably find it in about thirty seconds — a line item, a per-seat number, a total you feel reasonably good about.
Now find the rest of it.
The subscriptions on personal cards, coming back through expense reports labeled software, or professional development, or nothing at all. The department that signed up for its own tool because waiting for approval wasn't an option. The four people across your Wilmington or Kennett Square office paying twenty dollars a month each for four different models that all do roughly the same thing — none of which your company actually owns.
That's the second bill. It doesn't arrive. It doesn't get approved. And it is not the expensive part.
The expensive part is what doesn't compound
Here's the thing that should bother a finance leader more than the duplicate subscriptions.
In PwC's 2026 Global CEO Survey, 56% of chief executives said AI had produced no significant financial benefit for their business. Only 12% could point to both a cost improvement and a revenue improvement. These aren't companies that failed to adopt AI. These are companies that adopted it, spent money on it, and still can't find where the value went.
Four people using four different AI tools are not four times as productive. They're four silos. Someone in operations figures out how to cut a recurring three-hour task down to forty minutes — and that knowledge stays in their head, in their tool, on their personal account. Someone in finance solves an almost identical problem six weeks later, starting from zero, in a completely different product. Nothing accumulates. Nothing transfers. Nothing gets better across the company because it got better for one person.
You're paying for individual productivity, and that's exactly what you're getting: individual, unrepeatable, unmeasurable — and it walks out the door the day that person leaves.
That's before we even get to the parts that don't show up as spend at all. Company data sitting in tools you don't control. No volume leverage on pricing, because you're buying in ones instead of negotiating as an organization. Per-seat rates that are a fraction of what you'd get with a coordinated plan. And no line of sight — none — from any of it back to a recovered hour or a recovered dollar.
This is what makes AI sprawl a uniquely bad category of spend. Most uncontrolled spend is simply wasteful. This kind is wasteful and compounding against you, because the longer it runs unmanaged, the more value gets locked into places you'll never be able to reach.
The five numbers you can't produce
Try this. Right now, without asking anyone, answer these five questions.
- How many AI models are running in your business? Not licensed — running. Including the ones on personal accounts nobody reported.
- What percentage of your workforce is using AI? Weekly, not "ever tried it once."
- What percentage of that usage is governed — a sanctioned tool, under your control, with a policy behind it?
- What percentage is charged back to a department, a cost center, a budget owner?
- What percentage is tied to a stated business outcome rather than one person's personal preference?
If you're like most small and mid-sized businesses, you can't answer any of the five with real confidence. Some leaders can't even answer the first one within a factor of two.
Sit with that for a second. This is a category of spend and risk running inside your business right now — touching client data, absorbing budget, shaping how work actually gets done — and there's no number attached to any of it. You wouldn't accept that gap in any other part of the business. Payroll, inventory, vendor contracts — you'd have caught this in a review a long time ago.
The reason it hasn't been caught is that nobody owns it. It didn't come in through procurement. It came in through people trying to do their jobs well, faster, on their own initiative — which is exactly why this isn't a discipline problem. It's a missing map.
You can't fix what you can't see
Notice that none of this is an argument for spending more on AI. It's an argument for seeing what you're already spending.
That's the good news buried in here, and it's the reason this is worth an hour of your time rather than a new project plan. Most companies that finally sit down and work through these five numbers discover two things at once: they're spending more than they thought, and they're capturing less of it than they thought. Which means the first move isn't a purchase. It's consolidation — one sanctioned path, negotiated pricing, gains that actually stack across the team, and a clear policy that gives people permission to use the tool you've already paid for instead of finding their own.
Companies routinely find they were already paying for AI capability buried inside licenses they already hold — while separately reimbursing staff for personal subscriptions doing the same job. That's not a technology problem. That's a visibility problem, and visibility is cheap.
The hours are there. Most small and mid-sized businesses are sitting on four to eight recoverable hours per knowledge worker, per week, in repetitive admin and information search. The spend is there too. Right now, neither one is on a report you've actually seen.
Come find your five numbers
We're running a working session on exactly this: what shadow AI is costing businesses like yours, how to find the five numbers hiding inside your own company, and what to do with them once you have them.
Not a product demo. Not a keynote about transformation. A method for producing the numbers — and a walkthrough of what most companies find when they run it.
This is the same posture MySherpa has taken with the businesses we've supported since 1997: we don't just care about the technology, we care about what it's actually doing for you and your people. Finding the map before you spend more is the responsible next step, not a sales pitch dressed up as one.
Webinar: The Shadow AI Audit — What's Really Running in Your Business
45 minutes. You'll leave with the five-number framework, the questions to ask your own team, and a clear read on the cost and exposure sitting inside your company right now.
Built for finance and operations leaders at companies between 25 and 200 people.
Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the recording and the audit worksheet.
Questions before then? Reach the MySherpa team at 302-781-3005 or sales@mysherpa.com — our Wilmington and Kennett Square offices are both a short call away.