Every year I make time to read the Flexera State of ITAM Report from start to finish. Not because it tells me something I have never heard before, but because it puts hard numbers behind the things I already feel in client meetings every week. The 2026 edition, based on a survey of 512 ITAM, SAM and FinOps professionals, was no exception. I kept nodding along as I read it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The big picture is this. Our discipline is finally being treated as strategic, but the environments we are asked to manage are growing faster than our ability to see into them. That tension runs through the whole report. Here are the trends that stood out most to me, and where they line up with what I run into on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If there is one story in this year\u2019s report, it is artificial intelligence. Tracking or adopting new AI applications is now the single biggest challenge in the survey, named by 84% of respondents. Nearly half (47%) expect to significantly increase their focus on AI software in the next few years. And yet only 31% of ITAM teams say they actually have visibility into the AI software running in their organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That gap is the part that worries me. Flexera also found that 48% of organizations claim they are tracking and rightsizing their AI contracts, while only 31% of ITAM teams report real visibility. Put those two numbers side by side and you get a familiar picture. People believe they are in control, but the team that would normally own the data is not in the room yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I see this at clients constantly. A business unit buys Copilot licenses directly, someone in marketing expenses a ChatGPT Enterprise plan, and a development team starts paying per seat for an AI coding assistant. None of it touches the SAM tooling, and nobody can answer the basic questions we ask about every other vendor. How many seats, who is actually using them, and what are we paying per active user. It is the same pattern we lived through with SaaS a decade ago, except the spend is climbing faster and the contracts are messier. The report backs this up: 59% of organizations say their wasted AI spend went up year over year. That is not a rounding error. That is money leaving the building while governance tries to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My honest view is that AI is the clearest opportunity SAM teams have had in years to prove their value. We already know how to inventory, meter usage and challenge a renewal. AI simply needs us to point those same skills at a new category before the bills get out of hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was the quieter finding that I keep coming back to. The share of organizations reporting complete visibility into their IT assets fell to just 36% this year, down seven percentage points. At the same time, 78% of teams name maintaining an accurate inventory as their top SAM responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we agree the foundation matters more than ever, and we are seeing less of the estate than we did a year ago. That sounds contradictory until you remember how much is being added. SaaS, containers, cloud subscriptions and now AI tools all expand the surface area faster than most teams can map it. From my experience, the clients who feel most in control are not the ones with the prettiest dashboards. They are the ones who treat their inventory as something living and keep their discovery data and CMDB honest. Everything else we do, whether that is optimization, audit defense or renewal planning, sits on top of that data. If the data is wrong, every decision downstream is wrong too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The structural shift in the report is hard to miss. ITAM teams reporting directly to a CIO or CTO dropped by six percentage points, while those reporting into cloud management or FinOps rose by five. Seventy-eight percent of organizations now have a dedicated FinOps team, and a striking 92% of ITAM professionals say they are upskilling for FinOps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The number that made me smile was about public cloud savings. Responsibility for generating those savings is now almost evenly split between ITAM and FinOps, where last year ITAM and SAM teams led comfortably. The lines are blurring fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have mixed feelings about this. When ITAM and FinOps work well together the results are excellent, because one side understands licensing entitlements and the other understands consumption and cloud commercial models. When they do not, I see the same failure at clients again and again. Both teams assume the other is handling a renewal or a commitment, and in the end nobody is. Shared accountability quietly turns into nobody\u2019s accountability. If your organization is going through this convergence, my advice is to be almost annoyingly specific about who owns what. A clear line on paper saves a very expensive surprise later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One trend I was pleased to see in the data is that SAM teams are starting to push back. Negotiating contract terms with vendors as a way to manage SaaS jumped 14 percentage points this year, and chargeback or showback appeared as a new practice, with 23% already using it. That tells me teams are moving from passively counting subscriptions to actively challenging them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It needs to happen, because the sprawl is real. Reported SaaS wasted spend rose by ten percentage points, with IaaS and PaaS up eight. In my experience SaaS waste is rarely one big mistake. It is hundreds of small ones. Licenses still assigned to people who left, two departments paying for tools that do the same job, premium tiers bought for features nobody uses. Chargeback changes the conversation, because the moment a department sees its own SaaS bill, the unused licenses tend to disappear quickly. I have watched a simple showback report do more for license hygiene than any policy ever did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For anyone hoping audit pressure was easing, the report is a reality check. Almost half of organizations (48%) were audited in the past year. Microsoft audits jumped 14 percentage points and were reported by 64% of those audited, with Oracle close behind at 50%. Across three years, 44% of organizations spent more than a million on audits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This matches what we deal with daily. Microsoft and Oracle are still the two names that come up most when a client calls us slightly panicked, and the trigger is almost always the same. Use rights changed, a deployment grew quietly, or a cloud migration was never reflected in the licensing position. The report notes that the complexity of software use rights remains one of the top challenges, and I would go further. It is the single most underestimated risk in our field. You can be perfectly compliant on license counts and still be exposed because of how a product is actually being used. The teams that stay calm during an audit are the ones who built a defensible license position before the letter arrived, not after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, the report confirms where everyone\u2019s energy is going. Optimizing software spend is the top SAM priority, and the gap between it and the next initiative is the widest Flexera has recorded in five years of running the survey. The mood is \u201csave more, spend less\u201d, which will surprise nobody given the budget pressure most of us work under.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I like is that the savings levers people are using are the unglamorous ones that actually work. Reusing licenses instead of buying new, downgrading editions that are over-specified, rightsizing, and negotiating harder at renewal. Among advanced organizations, 94% reported real savings from license reuse alone. None of that needs new technology. It needs good data and the discipline to act on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My main takeaway from the 2026 report is that the fundamentals of the job have not changed, but the stakes have. Clean data, clear ownership and proactive governance are what separate the teams that stay ahead from the ones that spend their lives firefighting. AI is the new frontier, FinOps is the new neighbor we have to get along with, and the audit is the old threat that never really went away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the work we do at ITAM solutions every day. Whether you need to get a real grip on your AI and SaaS spend, build a defensible license position ahead of your next Microsoft or Oracle audit, or align your SAM and FinOps efforts so nothing slips through the cracks, we can help you turn the trends in this report into a concrete plan for your own estate. If any of this sounds like your organization, I would be glad to talk it through. Reach out to us at ITAM solutions and we will help you find where your biggest risks, and your biggest savings, really are.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every year I make time to read the Flexera State of ITAM Report from start to finish. Not because it tells me something I have never heard before, but because it puts hard numbers behind the things I already feel in client meetings every week. The 2026 edition, based on a survey of 512 ITAM,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98552,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[371],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it-asset-management","category-371","description-off"],"yoast_head":"\n