Invoices for software renewals landing on finance’s desk are nothing new. Subscriptions for Salesforce, Microsoft and other tools have been on the books for years, so auto-renewals aren’t exactly a surprise. It might even be tempting to approve these without taking more than a glance at the numbers.
But many of these auto-renewal subscriptions now include stealth upgrades for AI features. And that makes every software renewal worth a second look.
For midmarket CFOs, AI costs are coming from two directions. There's the spending they're choosing to make, and the spending that was already decided for them, buried in contracts signed before AI pricing existed.
Research from Gartner predicts that end-user spending on GenAI models in Europe will grow 78% in 2026. Pleo’s inaugural European Finance Index supports the trend predicted by Gartner: our index examined aggregated and anonymised data from over 40,000 customers, and found that in Q1 2026, software was the category with the largest quarter-on-quarter increase.
In Europe, software spend showed a +7.8% increase from the last quarter of 2025. In the UK, that change was slightly greater, at +8.1%.
For the first time, OpenAI (ChatGPT) appeared in the top merchants for Q1 2026, coming in at number 18. That shows businesses are done experimenting with AI and are now paying for enterprise subscriptions and API usage at scale.
In the UK, AI tools feature heavily in the tech spend stack leaderboard:
The biggest shift in the UK software market is the huge (and rapid) move toward Anthropic’s tools system. Anthropic (Claude) surged from number 12 to number 7, with the average spend per customer increasing +43.0% quarter over quarter.
These new investments in AI are significant. But they’re not the whole story.
As well as new subscriptions, AI costs are also showing up as embedded AI uplifts inside existing subscriptions for tools like Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and Figma.
When viewed across your entire tech stack, increases within existing subscriptions can start to add up fast. Take Figma, for example. Our European Finance Index shows that despite only a 5% increase in users from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026, Figma showed a 28.6% increase in average spend over the same period. What changed? The pricing.
As AI features move from experimental beta features to default capabilities, vendors are starting to charge for usage. Whether that’s through AI credits, higher per-seat subscriptions or mandatory upgrades, vendors are now pricing these features as an uplift.
As a result, the cost of auto-renewals can quickly add up, often outside your finance team’s normal visibility.
AI spend isn’t going anywhere, so what’s needed now is visibility. As Pleo’s latest report, Europe’s AI Spending Surge, puts it:
"The finance function's role isn't to approve or decline AI spend. It's to create line item visibility: which tools, which teams, pricing model, and renewal cadence. Without that visibility, you're managing a surprise, not a strategy."
Here’s how to achieve this visibility:
Our latest report includes a collection of key sources showing what Europe’s mid-market businesses are spending on AI, which companies are adopting, and what’s blocking the rest.