You are paying for seats nobody sits in

If you manage a company in the GCC, you already know the feeling: a tool someone bought two years ago, still on the credit card, still in the budget pack, used by four people out of the forty you pay for.

That is not a rounding error. It is the normal state of software ownership.

Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index — 40 million licences and $75 billion in spend — puts unused licences at 36% against recommended utilisation. Vertice, looking at a similarly large spend book in Q2 2026, puts the wider waste number higher: 65% of licences unused or underused (less than half the purchased seats actually working), of which 14% are fully abandoned shelfware.

• Licences unused vs recommended utilisation36%

  Zylo 2026. The cleanest single ‘empty seat’ number.

• Unused or underused (<50% of seats active)65%

  Vertice Q2 2026. Includes tools that are ‘live’ but mostly idle.

• Fully abandoned shelfware14%

  Vertice Q2 2026. Paid for. Nobody logs in.

Unused rate: Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index (40M licences, $75B spend). Unused + underused / fully abandoned: Vertice Q2 2026 ($75B+ processed spend). These are not GCC-only samples — treat them as a floor, not a local census.

You do not need to be a 10,000-person enterprise for this to hurt. At 40 people, 36% unused is not “$20 million of waste.” It is a CRM you oversized, a project tool the last manager bought, a design suite on a founder’s card, and a second helpdesk that lost the argument and never got cancelled. That is still real money, every year, in a region where software is often bought once and lived with for years.

Why it keeps happening

Zylo’s 2026 index is blunt about ownership: business units now control 81% of SaaS spend. IT directly manages 15%. Expense-based SaaS spend — the card, the personal ChatGPT, the “just this once” subscription — was up 267% year on year, and ChatGPT is now the most-expensed app in that dataset.

• Spend controlled by business units81%
• Spend IT directly manages15%
• IT leaders hit by surprise consumption charges78%

Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index. 78% of surveyed IT leaders reported unexpected consumption / AI charges in the last 12 months; 61% cut other projects to cover them.

This is the GCC pattern too, even without a local census: a department head buys what the last company used, a partner “includes” extra seats in a bundle, a renewal auto-rolls because nobody owned the calendar. Nobody is stealing. Nobody is looking.

Seats vs usage is not a report. It is a conversation.

A usage export from the vendor is a starting point, not the answer. Vendors count logins the way that makes the renewal look healthy. You want:

• Licences purchased vs licences assigned vs licences that did a real job last month. A login is not a job.
• Who requested the tool, and whether they still work there.
• Whether a cheaper tier, a shared licence, or a different product already in the stack does 80% of it.
• The renewal date and the notice window. Unused seats you discover 11 days before auto-renewal are a complaint, not a negotiation.

Do this per product, not as a grand “SaaS transformation.” Start with the three largest contracts. CRM, Microsoft 365 / Google, and whatever the company uses to get paid.

What “optimise” actually means

There are only four honest outcomes, and they are not equally comfortable:

1. Reclaim seats — turn them off, or stop paying for the idle ones at renewal.
2. Downgrade the tier — you bought Enterprise because the demo had a dashboard. Three people use it.
3. Consolidate — two tools doing one job. Pick one. The other is a migration, not a “maybe later.”
4. Leave — if usage is low and the job is real, the product is wrong. That is a switch, not a discount.

A vendor will offer a discount to keep the seat count. That is not optimisation. That is a cheaper version of the same waste.

What to do this week

• Export seat lists for your three biggest contracts. Add a column: last meaningful action, not last login.
• Send that list to the department head who “owns” it. Ask them to mark keep / drop / don’t know. Don’t know becomes drop in 30 days unless someone claims it.
• Put renewal + notice-window dates on one calendar. 180 / 90 / 60 / 30. Not in someone’s head.
• Anything purchased on a personal card in the last year: write it down. That is your shadow stack. It is already in the Zylo numbers. It is in yours too.

If you want a structured pass at this — seats, contract value, whether to renegotiate or migrate — that is the “optimise what you pay for” branch of the tech check. The spreadsheet is still yours. The sequence is the part companies skip.

Sources

• Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index (Jan 2026): 36% unused licences; IT manages 15% of spend; business units 81%; expense-based SaaS +267% YoY
• Vertice unused-SaaS insights, Q2 2026: 65% unused or underused; 14% fully abandoned
• Zylo, “What Is Shelfware?” (2026): 53% unused or not used enough to warrant the spend, on their blended definition