Do this: Paste three months of software charges into a free chatbot and get back a kill list with the yearly cost of every tool nobody opened.
PASTE THIS
You are auditing software spend for a 5-50 person business. Below are three months of card statement lines. 1. Group them by tool. Give monthly cost, yearly cost, and what each one is for in one line. 2. Mark each KEEP, DOWNGRADE or KILL. Use one test: is there a named person who opened it in the last 30 days? 3. Total the yearly cost of everything marked KILL. 4. Ask one question per tool you cannot identify. 5. Output a table, then a one-paragraph verdict. Statement lines: [paste here]
You'll get: A table with a dollar figure per tool, a keep-or-kill call, and one total: the yearly spend to cancel this week. Send the kill list to whoever signs the card.
The five lines to give any AI agent that touches money
Walmart started publishing terms for agents that shop on its site. Banks are learning to write them the hard way. Here is the short version any business can paste into a staff channel this morning.
If a vendor will not sign these five lines, that is the answer.
Forrester puts AI at a fifth of all business tech spend next year, and says more than half of the people buying it will miss their ROI targets. Only 22 percent can point to an earnings improvement from the last year of it. The forecast is not the purchase order. Buy the seat that gets opened in March.
Forrester expects AI to take a fifth of business technology spend next year, and says more than half of CIOs will miss their AI ROI targets. Only 22 percent report a positive earnings impact from the past year, per the survey.
It expects open-weight models to carry half of all AI tokens at five percent of spend: cheap enough for documents, support replies and search.
So what: before signing any renewal for next year, make the vendor name the number it will move and the date it gets measured.
Banks are locking out agents nobody vetted
Major US banks are finding third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, some acting beyond what the customer authorised, and are restricting agent access, Axios reports. So what: this week, list every tool holding a live connection to the business bank account and put a name against each one.
One retailer opened the door, the other sued
Walmart will let AI agents shop from next month with per-agent profiles, spending caps and approval on each purchase, while Amazon sued Perplexity over its agent and blocked Meta's Muse (The Verge, TechCrunch). So what: if a platform brings you sales, get its agent policy in writing before the holiday quarter, because a blocked agent appears as a quiet drop in traffic, not an error.
AI invented the food, Just Eat apologised
Just Eat apologised after AI menu images turned a bacon and egg soda into a glass of cola with egg floating in it, and a cheese roll into sushi; it is pulling the images and pausing new ones (BBC). So what: this week, check the first five AI-written photos or descriptions on your own listings, because a wrong dish with an allergen in it is a refund and a screenshot.
This week's question: fourteen AI subscriptions and nobody can say what half of them do. Where does the audit start? With the card statement, not the tool dashboard. The dashboard lists what was bought; the statement lists what is still being charged. Three months of lines, grouped by tool, one name against each. Anything with no name behind it gets cancelled by Friday, and each vendor's own renewal date becomes the deadline for the rest. Expect the kill list to be shorter than the fear and pricier than the guess.
What happens to an AI tool at your business when nobody can name its owner?
A. It renews quietly
B. Someone cancels it in month two
C. It sits unopened until an audit
D. Every tool has a named owner
Reply with one letter — results next issue.
A certificate authority is quitting the SSL business after its private keys were found to be as short as 3 bits. How many possible values does a 3-bit key have?
Answer tomorrow — and no, we are not printing it here.
YESTERDAY'S ANSWER
Meta's Muse hit 10 million US downloads in 40 days. Only how many other apps have done that?
Eleven other apps.
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