The AI that came free with your software
You are probably paying for three AI subscriptions and using four more you did not buy. The free ones are the interesting half.
An SME that has bought nothing at all still has AI in about six places. Your mail client summarises threads. Your video tool writes meeting notes. Your phones rewrite text. Your document store answers questions about its own files. None of this appeared on an invoice.
The inventory post in November treated these as a governance problem, which they are. They are also an opportunity, and almost nobody uses them.
Why the bundled features get ignored
Three reasons, all of them structural rather than about quality.
Nobody announced them. They arrived in an update. There was no rollout, no training, no email. Features that nobody introduces are features that nobody discovers.
They are in the wrong place. The summarise button is in a menu three levels down in a product people use for something else entirely.
They sound unambitious. « Summarise this thread » does not feel like an AI strategy, so it does not get talked about in the way a project does. It also happens to be the single most-used AI function in most companies that use any.
Why you should look before buying anything new
Because the bundled version is free, already covered by your existing data processing agreement, and already inside whatever security arrangement you have with that vendor.
Buying a separate tool to do something your existing software already does means a new contract, a new data path, a new subprocessor and a new line on the supplier questionnaire — for a capability you were already paying for.
The half-hour that pays
Take the three pieces of software your office actually lives in. Open each, and find every AI feature in the menus. Write them down.
Then show the list to the people who use that software. In most SMEs, two or three of the items will be things somebody wanted and did not know existed.
That is a better first AI project than most purchases, it costs nothing, and it has the useful side effect of completing the tool list you need for the page anyway.