Artificial intelligence is being adopted at an unprecedented pace. What was considered a pilot project just a short time ago has rapidly evolved into an operational tool used across almost every business function. Today, employees across departments can independently subscribe to AI platforms, activate cloud-based services, or purchase API credits, often in just a few clicks.
Across Europe, AI adoption continues to accelerate. According to Eurostat, one in five European businesses was already using AI technologies in 2025, with Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the Benelux region among the continent's leading markets.
The message is clear: AI has moved beyond experimentation and is becoming an integral part of day-to-day business operations.
As AI becomes embedded across organizations, spending on digital tools is increasingly originating outside the IT department. This raises an important question for CFOs, Finance, and Procurement teams:
How do you maintain visibility, control, and governance over this fast-growing category of business spend without slowing down innovation?
One of the biggest shifts brought about by artificial intelligence is not the technology itself, but the way business spend is created.
In the past, software procurement was typically managed centrally by the IT department. Purchases were largely predictable, recurring, and relatively easy to oversee.
Today, every department can independently subscribe to SaaS applications, purchase API credits, adopt AI tools, onboard specialized platforms or activate cloud-based services. At the same time, pricing models are becoming increasingly flexible, with costs driven by subscriptions, usage, or consumption rather than fixed licence fees.
The result is faster innovation – but also greater fragmentation of business spend.
Usage-based billing, API consumption and credit-based pricing make AI-related costs far more dynamic than traditional software purchases. This creates new challenges around spend visibility, security, data governance, privacy, and financial control.
The challenge is no longer the cost of an individual software licence. It is maintaining a complete and accurate view of AI spend across the organization.
Automatic renewals, duplicate subscriptions, inactive users, decentralized purchasing, and complex reconciliation processes all make it more difficult for Finance teams to answer fundamental questions such as:
As AI spend becomes more decentralized, the payment process itself becomes a critical part of financial governance. The real value does not come from the payment method alone, but from the visibility, data, and control it enables.
In the age of artificial intelligence, paying quickly is no longer enough. Organizations need to pay in a way that supports transparency, control, and informed decision-making.
Finance leaders are under increasing pressure to balance innovation with governance. Businesses need the flexibility to adopt new AI tools quickly while maintaining complete visibility, control and security over every transaction.
To address this challenge, AirPlus has developed an AI Spend Control approach designed to help organizations transform AI spend into a fully governed spend category.
With AirPlus Virtual Cards (virtual Mastercard credit cards) companies can create dedicated payment methods for individual suppliers, AI platforms, projects or teams, each with predefined spending rules, limits and validity periods.
Every payment can also be enriched with the financial data needed for efficient reporting and reconciliation, including:
As AI subscriptions and digital services are increasingly activated across different business units, this approach restores visibility, control, and governance to corporate spending processes, without slowing down innovation.
Artificial intelligence will continue to evolve through autonomous agents, consumption-based pricing models, APIs, and increasingly integrated business platforms.
The question is no longer which AI solution to choose. The real challenge is how to govern, control, and finance this rapidly growing category of spend while continuing to innovate at speed.
The answer lies in combining flexible payment solutions with structured financial data and robust spend governance.
Because innovation should never be slowed down. It should be scalable, measurable, and fully under control.
Think creating a virtual card is complicated? It takes less than 60 seconds.
Experience it for yourself with our Virtual Card Demo Tool.