After two years of app consolidation, SaaS stacks are growing once again, showed findings from BetterCloud’s latest “State of SaaS” report. The number of SaaS apps used by an organization went up 11 percent year over year after two years of decline. Mid-market firms, in particular, experienced the sharpest increase, jumping 41 percent from 116 to 164 apps yearover-year. And make no mistake, the growth is driven almost entirely by AI adoption, as organizations now deploy an average of 27 AI-powered apps, representing more than one-fifth of their SaaS app portfolios. Of course, at the same time, only 56 percent of apps are IT-sanctioned. What’s more, executives are disproportionately responsible for the spread of this shadow AI, showed a separate study by TrustedTech. Nearly two-thirds of decisionmakers surveyed by the Microsoft solution partner acknowledged using unapproved AI tools, more than double the proportion among lower-level employees. In other words, senior leadership working at the highest levels, making strategic decisions, are often operating outside established governance.Bottom of Form “Shadow AI is real, it’s spreading, and most teams don’t have the infrastructure to govern it,” researchers from BetterCloud warned. And it’s not just a security issue, either. Rather, shadow AI is looming as the newest budget crisis, the report continued, due to how those apps are being billed. Currently, BetterCloud estimated that 22 percent of SaaS tech stacks are now AI-powered. More than a third of those AI tools (36 percent) are billed using usagebased or token-consumption models rather than traditional, predictable per-seat or even hybrid pricing. The upshot is that a single employee’s unmanaged prompts can cost thousands of dollars. “Which brings us to a critical truth: modern AI governance cannot be separated from cost control,” warned the BetterCloud report. To proponents of usage-based payment models, they represent a win-win for both software vendor Usage-based pricing could put a strain on your customer relationships SaaS Budget Sprawl Everything-aaS By Martin Vilaboy 38 CHANNELVISION | SUMMER 2026
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