Pull up your AI spend for last quarter. If you run a business in DeKalb, Rockford, or Naperville, 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 as 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 paying twenty dollars a month each for four different models, all doing 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 Northern Illinois 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. These are companies that adopted, spent, and still can’t find the money.
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 account. Someone in finance solves an almost identical problem six weeks later, from zero, in a different product. Nothing accumulates. Nothing transfers. Nothing gets better across the company because it got better for one person.
You are paying for individual productivity and receiving exactly that: individual productivity, unrepeatable, unmeasurable, and walking out the door if that person ever leaves.
That’s before the parts that don’t even show up as spend. Company data sitting in tools you don’t control. No volume leverage on pricing, because you’re buying in ones instead of in blocks. Per-seat rates a fraction of what you’d negotiate as an organization. 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 merely wasteful. This kind is wasteful and it’s compounding against you, because the longer it runs, the more the value gets locked into places you can’t reach.
The five numbers you can’t produce
Try this. Right now, without asking anyone, answer these five:
How many AI models are running in your business? Not licensed. Running. Including the ones on personal accounts.
What percentage of your workforce is using AI? Weekly, not ever.
What percentage of that usage is governed — 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 an individual’s preference?
If you’re like most Northern Illinois SMBs we talk to, you can’t answer any of the five with confidence. Some leaders can’t 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 would not accept this in any other line of the business. You’d have found it in a review a long time ago.
The reason it hasn’t been found is that nobody owns it. It didn’t come in through procurement. It came in through people trying to do their jobs.
You can’t fix what you can’t see
Notice that none of this argues for spending more. It argues for seeing what’s already being spent.
That’s the good news buried in here, and it’s the reason this is worth an hour of your time rather than a project plan. Most companies that finally look at 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, volume pricing, gains that stack, and a policy that gives people permission to actually use the thing you’ve already paid for.
We’ve seen a version of this problem before, just with a different line item. One of our healthcare clients told us that before they moved to a fixed-fee IT model, their costs “fluctuated every month, making it hard to predict what our IT spend would be.” The problem wasn’t that IT was expensive — it’s that nobody could see the whole picture, so nothing could be planned against it. AI sprawl is the same story wearing a different name. Companies routinely find they were already paying for AI capability inside licenses they hold today, while separately reimbursing staff for personal subscriptions to do the same work. That’s not a technology problem. That’s a visibility problem, and visibility is cheap.
The hours are there — most SMBs are sitting on four to eight 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 seen.
Come find your five numbers
We’re running a working session on exactly this: what shadow AI is costing SMBs, how to find the five numbers inside your own business, 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 — brought to you by a team that’s been untangling IT spend for Northern Illinois businesses since 1989.
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, 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 across DeKalb, Rockford, and Naperville.
Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording and the audit worksheet.
Questions before then? Reach our team at sales@sundogit.com or 815.991.2400 — no sales pitch required to talk it through.