How to find unused AI licences before they renew

What counts as unused

Use one rule and stick to it. A good one: no activity in the last 30 days. Split that into two groups, because they need different conversations:

• seats that were used once and then dropped; and
• seats that were never switched on at all.

The second group is the easy win. Nobody will miss a tool they never opened.

Where to look

Each vendor’s admin console shows a last-activity date per seat, though they all put it somewhere different. The Microsoft 365 admin centre has usage reports for Copilot. GitHub shows Copilot seat activity in the organisation’s settings. Google Workspace has Gemini reports in its admin console.

Pull each one into a single list with the same columns: product, person, team, last active, monthly price. A list per vendor tells you very little. One list tells you where the money is going.

Put a price on it

Idle seats × monthly price × 12. Here is the example organisation from our home page:

Before you cut anything

• Check the contract. Annual commitments often can’t be reduced mid-term, so the date that matters is the renewal date. Put it in the diary three months ahead.
• Ask the team first. Some people use a tool once a month for a report that matters. Thirty days of silence isn’t proof nobody needs it.
• Reassign before you cancel. If anyone is waiting for a seat, an idle one costs nothing extra to hand over.

Make it a habit

Do it every quarter. New seats get added for each new project, and the count drifts back up within a few months of any clean-up.

How Lumela helps

Lumela’s assistant answers “which AI products have the most idle seats?” from your licence and usage data, across products, in one answer. It sits alongside the rest of the picture: what each product costs and what it returns. Read how we measure AI ROI.