Enterprise AI budgets are still going up. The ability to see where that money goes is going down.
Flexera surveyed 512 technology professionals worldwide for its 2026 State of ITAM Report. The main finding was about waste. 59% of organizations said wasted AI software spend increased over the past year. Only 7% said it decreased.
No other category came close. Public cloud software, the category that dominated waste conversations for most of the last decade, came in at 44%. SaaS came in at 43%. IaaS and PaaS came in at 41%. AI is now the fastest-growing source of wasted technology spend in the enterprise, and it got there in the same year most organizations started taking it seriously.
The visibility numbers explain why. Only 31% of organizations have accurate visibility into their AI software. Complete visibility across the entire IT estate fell to 36%, down from 43% in 2025. Only 29% measure the value of the AI software they are paying for.
"AI is changing the economics of IT faster than most organizations can adapt," said Becky Trevino, chief product officer at Flexera.
The Cost Problem Has Already Changed Decisions
KPMG's Q2 2026 Global AI Pulse, which surveyed 2,145 senior leaders across 20 countries at organizations with more than $50 million in annual revenue, shows what happens when the cost picture stays unclear.
49% of organizations said they have delayed, paused, or scaled back AI agent deployments because expected costs outweighed anticipated benefits. Roughly a quarter narrowed deployments. A similar share delayed further rollout.
These are not organizations abandoning AI. They are organizations that reached production and found the running costs were not what the pilot suggested.
Only 35% of organizations in the KPMG survey report full visibility into their AI operating costs. The rest are working from partial, delayed, or fragmented information. The difference that visibility makes is measurable. Organizations with full cost visibility are five times more likely to report established ROI than those without it, 15% compared with 3%.
The controls that would produce that visibility are not yet standard. Slightly more than half of organizations include cost reviews in AI approval processes. 40% use token or usage budgets. Fewer than 40% have architecture or prompt-design standards for efficiency.
Flexera's data shows the same gap from the asset management side. 84% of respondents named tracking and adopting AI applications as a top challenge, the most cited challenge in the survey.
48% are tracking and rightsizing AI contracts. 45% are actively identifying unsanctioned AI usage. More than half of ITAM teams now support AI-related responsibilities, and AI tracking is the single responsibility ITAM teams most plan to increase focus on.
The Budgets Are Growing Anyway
None of this is slowing spend down. Gartner's September 2026 forecast puts worldwide AI spending at $2.7 trillion this year, up 49.5% from 2025, rising to roughly $3.6 trillion in 2027. AI software alone is forecast at $461.6 billion in 2026.
John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, said the risks of "vendor lock-in, data sovereignty, and run-away costs" are not deterring buyers from adopting proprietary AI capabilities.
Inside enterprises, the intent is the same. A Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective report released this month found 87% of managers and senior leaders expect AI budgets to increase over the next 12 months, and 47% expect AI spending to rise by more than 10%.
In the same survey, 34% cited the cost of tools, computing, and licences as a barrier to better returns. Put the three data sets next to each other and the sequence is clear.
Spend is rising. Waste is rising faster than in any other category. Visibility into both is falling or stuck. And the 2027 budgets are being approved on top of the same governance gap that produced 2026's results.
"The organizations that succeed in AI transformation will modernize the governance and optimization frameworks," Trevino said.
The Flexera and KPMG numbers point in the same direction. Organizations that can see their AI costs are the ones getting a return on them. Organizations that cannot are the ones scaling back.
Most enterprises are in the second group. Only 31% have accurate visibility into AI software. Only 35% have full visibility into AI operating costs. Only 29% measure the value of what they are buying.
The question is not whether your organization is wasting AI spend. 59% of organizations already say they are, and that number rose this year. The question is whether anyone in your organization is measuring it before the 2027 budget gets signed.