Good Transformer
Five questions to ask before buying another AI tool
Tool sprawl is the quiet tax of AI adoption. Five plain questions that separate a useful purchase from another unused licence.
Every team I work with has more AI tools than it can name. Some arrived through a considered decision. Most arrived because someone saw a demo, a competitor mentioned it, or a free trial quietly converted into a line item. The result is a stack nobody fully understands and a budget nobody can defend.
Before the next one goes in, five questions are usually enough to tell a real need from a reflex.
1. What specific job does this do that we can't already do?
Not "what can it do" — what job, for whom, that your existing tools genuinely can't. If the honest answer overlaps 80% with something you already pay for, you're buying overlap, not capability.
2. Who owns it after the trial ends?
A tool with no owner is a tool that drifts. Someone has to be accountable for whether it's used, whether it's working, and whether it's still worth the cost in six months. If you can't name that person now, the purchase is already half-dead.
3. What does it touch?
Where does your data go, and what would it mean if that vendor had a breach? You don't need a legal review for everything, but you do need to know whether you're feeding client-confidential material into a system you haven't checked. "We're not sure" is an answer — it's just not a reassuring one.
4. How will we know if it worked?
Decide the signal before you buy, not after. Adoption rate, time saved on a named task, error reduction — something. A tool you can't evaluate is a tool you'll renew out of inertia.
5. What does it replace?
New tools should retire old ones, or at least old habits. If nothing comes out when something goes in, you're not adopting AI — you're accumulating it. The stack only stays manageable if buying something is also a decision to stop doing something else.
The goal isn't fewer tools for its own sake. It's a stack where every item earns its place and someone can say why.
None of this requires a procurement committee. It requires five honest answers before the licence is signed — which is exactly when they're cheapest to get.