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- AI is the software UAE companies pay for most often, with about 31% paying OpenAI and about 31% paying Anthropic, roughly 7 points ahead of Adobe, Google Workspace, and Microsoft.
- About 1 in 5 companies pay for both AI providers, which is roughly 2 in 3 of each one’s customers in the data.
- The typical company with software on its cards pays for about 6 tools, and at about 1 in 3 of them the same tool is paid on two or more cards in the same month.
- About 4 in 10 tools appear in only one month of the year, which makes annual renewals and forgotten trials easy to miss.
- The fix is giving the software list an owner: choose AI tools on purpose, move to team plans when several people pay separately, put recurring software on its own cards, and review one-off tools every quarter.
The software UAE companies pay for most often is AI.
About 3 in 10 companies in our data pay OpenAI, and about 3 in 10 pay Anthropic. That puts both ahead of Adobe, Google Workspace and Microsoft. And most of the companies paying one are paying the other too.
We looked at the software paid for by more than 2,000 UAE companies between September 2025 and August 2026: which tools, how many, and how they're bought. The short answer is that software is now everyone's purchase, made one card at a time.
AI is the most common software companies pay for
About 31% of companies pay OpenAI, including ChatGPT, and about 31% pay Anthropic, including Claude. The two are effectively tied, and both sit about 7 points clear of everything else.
Next come Adobe at about 24%, Google Workspace and Cloud at 23% or more, and Microsoft at about 22%. Canva follows at about 16%.
The more interesting number is the overlap. About 1 in 5 companies pay both OpenAI and Anthropic, which is roughly 2 in 3 of each AI company's customers in our data. For most teams that use AI, it comes as a pair of tools used side by side.
The typical company pays for about 6 tools
About 3 in 4 companies pay for at least one software tool on their company cards. Among those, the typical company pays for about 6. The middle half pays for somewhere between 2 and 14.
The smallest companies pay for around 5 tools, and mid-sized and larger ones for around 8 or 9. The spread within each size group is far wider than the gap between them.
Software is a small slice of the total. It makes up about 5% of a typical company's transactions and about 4% of its spend. That's part of why it's easy to lose track of: lots of separate charges, none of them big enough to stand out.
Tools bought one card at a time
At about 1 in 3 companies that pay for software, the same tool gets paid on two or more different cards in the same month.
AI tools top that list by a distance, with Anthropic and OpenAI well ahead. Adobe, Microsoft and Google come next, followed by newer AI tools like Cursor and Higgsfield.
That isn't necessarily waste. Often it's individual employees signing up for the tool they need, on their own card, which is exactly how most self-serve software is designed to be bought. But it does mean the company's software list is being written by many people at once, and nobody may be looking at the whole thing.
Four in ten tools show up only once
At the typical company, about 4 in 10 of the software tools it pays for appear in just one month of the year.
Some of those are annual plans, billed once and running all year. Others are trials, one-off purchases, or a month someone tried a tool and moved on. From the card data alone, the two look the same.
That's the practical problem. An annual renewal that only appears once a year is easy to forget until it charges again, and a tool someone tried for a month is easy to lose track of entirely.
Design tools get stacked
About 1 in 4 companies pay Adobe, and about 1 in 6 pay Canva. Around 1 in 10 pay both.
The overlap runs mostly one way. About 6 in 10 companies paying for Canva also pay for Adobe, while about 4 in 10 Adobe customers also pay for Canva.
That often reflects how teams work: a designer on Adobe, and everyone else making quick graphics in Canva. It's a reasonable setup. It's also exactly the kind of overlap worth a deliberate decision, rather than one that just happened.
What to do with this
Most of the fix comes down to someone looking at the whole list.
- Give the software list an owner. When tools are bought one card at a time, the full picture only exists if someone puts it together. A short list of every tool, who uses it and when it renews goes a long way.
- Make the AI decision on purpose. Paying for both OpenAI and Anthropic is a perfectly good choice, and most companies here make it. Just make it a choice, with a reason, rather than the sum of individual sign-ups.
- Move to team plans once a few people pay separately. If three people are each paying for the same tool on their own card, a team plan usually brings admin controls and one bill, and often a better price.
- Put recurring software on its own cards. A card per tool, or per team, makes every renewal easy to spot and easy to stop.
- Review the one-month tools every quarter. Put annual renewals on a calendar before they charge again, and cancel anything nobody is using.
For more on the long list of small vendors that software sits inside, see our tail spend benchmark.
How we did this
This analysis uses anonymized transaction data from companies using Alaan. It describes software paid for on company cards at those companies, not every business in the UAE, and not software paid by bank transfer or invoice.
- Sample: More than 2,000 companies with at least 50 successful card purchases between September 1, 2025 and August 31, 2026.
- Software: Identified by the card network's merchant category and by brand. Advertising, payment services and other non-software merchants are excluded.
- Brands: Related merchant names are combined, so ChatGPT counts as OpenAI and Claude counts as Anthropic.
- Typical company: Figures are medians across companies, so a few very large customers don't skew the result.
- What we don't claim: These are observed patterns, and all figures are rounded.
