You won’t meet many business leaders who doubt the value of collaboration platforms anymore, particularly the AI-powered ones. There are too many exciting TEI reports for things like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Cisco Webex for companies to feel uncertain.
We all know intelligent UC and collaboration tools make teams faster, more productive, and better-connected. So, why are board leaders and buying committees still nervous?
The easy answer is collaboration inflation. Every year, the costs of collaboration tools increase. Sometimes sharply, sometimes subtly. Budget owners approve renewals, approve add-ons, approve another “small” AI upgrade, then struggle to explain what they’re actually getting back. Not because collaboration isn’t working. Because the gap between TCO and ROI is widening.
Collaboration inflation isn’t reckless buying or vendors behaving badly. It’s the result of how collaboration platforms now evolve: layered AI, tiered bundles, feature expansion that outpaces adoption, and operational overhead that rarely shows up on a quote. The real collaboration TCO lives well beyond per-user pricing, and most organizations only notice it once finance starts asking uncomfortable questions.
Time to stop pretending this will sort itself out.
Collaboration Inflation and the Rising Costs of Collaboration Tools
People talk about rising UC costs as if they’re just comparing another round of vendor price hikes. That misses what’s actually happening.
Collaboration inflation isn’t about one invoice going up. It’s about the stack getting heavier every year.
Start with AI. Most platforms now treat AI as a pricing layer, not a feature. You don’t just “turn it on.” You unlock it. Sometimes per user. Sometimes per workload. Sometimes per feature. “Included AI” often means limited access, capped usage, or a stripped-down version designed to push you towards a higher tier.
Then come bundles. Platforms collapse chat, meetings, analytics, security, and governance into neat-looking packages. Buying gets easier. Understanding what you’re actually paying for gets harder. A single requirement, like advanced reporting, compliance, or AI summaries, can push an entire workforce into a more expensive tier, even if only a fraction of users need it.
We’ll use Microsoft as an example here. The company increased its prices yet again for 2026 (some plans increasing by as much as 33%). The justification was “innovative AI costs more”. The pushback came from companies (reasonably), asking whether those AI updates were things they’d actually use.
How the Costs of Collaboration Tools are Changing
A decade ago, collaboration spend was easy to explain. You paid for calling. Then meetings and messaging. Maybe a few extra reports here and there. Now, modern UC and collaboration tools are layered systems. Messaging and meetings are just the beginning.
Usually, you’re also paying for persistent workspaces, project management, workflow integrations, compliance tools, and predictive insights, too. Even if you didn’t ask for that.
That gap matters for collaboration TCO. You’re not just paying for what people use. You’re paying for what the platform can do, what it might do later, and what it requires to manage at scale.
Everything is automatically bundled, because it simplifies procurement. But if just one team needs something different, suddenly everyone’s on a higher tier, and the costs of collaboration tools rise across the board (even if usage doesn’t). You might try to reduce the fees by buying multiple lower-tier versions of different products, but then you end up with the cost of managing UC and collaboration complexity on top of everything else.
AI, as we mentioned, just makes things more complicated. The free tiers are just there to get you excited. Once you’re drawn in and relying on more AI tools for everything, you end up paying again for more tiers, licences, and usage models. Sometimes that happens even before employees know how AI should fit into daily work. So costs grow, but adoption and ROI don’t.
The Collaboration Inflation Breakdown: Calculating TCO
If you’re wondering whether collaboration inflation is already a problem for your business, it helps to take a closer look at how you’re calculating TCO (total cost of ownership). In the first place.
A surprising number of teams still talk about collaboration TCO as if it starts and ends with per-user licences. Licences are the cleanest part of the spend, which is exactly why they get all the attention, but they’re just the start. What you really need to think about today is:
- Base per-user licences
- Premium feature tiers
- AI add-ons and usage-based entitlements
- Charges for storage, transcription, analytics, and reporting
Then, there are the other, subtler fees that frequently get overlooked, the prices for:
- Tool overlap across teams and regions
- Integration and API work to make platforms talk to each other
- Security, compliance, and governance overhead that grows with every new feature
- Admin time spent managing users, numbers, devices, and policies
- Reactive troubleshooting caused by poor visibility
- Training and re-training as features, interfaces, and AI tools keep changing
Examining all of these things carefully makes budgeting a lot more complicated, but also far more realistic. That realistic view is how you take an approach to buying new tools that stops collaboration inflation before it has a chance to start.
How to Prevent Collaboration Inflation: Buying with Strategy
Every company is keen to spend more on smarter tools these days. They’re also under a lot more pressure to prove that the spending is worth it. Nobody wants to end up being the latest evidence that the AI bubble is bursting, or that UC strategies are failing.
The trouble is that most companies don’t end up overspending just because they choose the wrong platform. They’re overspending because they bought capability without deciding who was responsible for turning it into value. Features arrive. Licences expand. Adoption is assumed.
That assumption is expensive.
It isn’t just that you end up spending more on tech that never has a chance to pay off. There’s a tax on your people, too. They end up with more tools to learn that end up getting ditched after a couple of months, and more complexity to work around.
Here’s how leaders can take a smarter approach.
Step 1: Map collaboration use cases to outcomes
This sounds obvious. Every technology buying guide recommends it. Almost nobody does it properly. Ask simple questions before you start calculating numbers:
- Which collaboration tools actually shorten decision cycles?
- Which ones reduce follow-up work instead of creating more of it?
- Where does internal collaboration clearly affect customer experience, faster responses, fewer handoffs, and better continuity? Which features enable that?
This initial step is important because it helps identify what kind of investments are actually going to impact growth in measurable ways, and where you could end up spending more money without getting any meaningful outcomes. It also means you have a clearer idea of how you should be tracking the ROI of the collaboration tools you introduce.
Step 2: Run a licence and usage reality check
Collaboration inflation runs rampant when companies have no clear way of actually tracking what their teams are using. Individual platforms like Microsoft sometimes give you tools to help track the adoption of certain features. That only helps if you’re using one specific toolkit.
If you’re not, UC service management platforms like Voss and Kurmi give you a far more holistic picture. You might find:
- Entire departments licensed for AI features they’ve never touched
- Premium meeting capabilities used by a small minority
- Multiple tools licensed for the same workflow
If 100% of your team has licences for things they “might” need, but only 20% are actually using them, you know where the higher costs of collaboration tools are actually coming from.
Step 3: Look for overlap, not tool count
The mistake is chasing “tool sprawl” remedies like you’re trying to reach a specific number: take fifteen platforms down to five, or five down to one. What really matters is overlap:
- Two platforms doing meeting summaries
- Three places where tasks get created
- Multiple analytics dashboards no one fully trusts
Sometimes, companies really do need multiple platforms that seem like they do the same thing. Most of the time, though, they can find opportunities to consolidate. If abandoning one platform cuts admin overhead and reduces costs without harming productivity, it’s worthwhile.
Step 4: Keep Monitoring Consistent
Collaboration inflation can creep in over time, without anyone noticing, particularly as tools continue to add new (similar) features. So you need to monitor constantly. Track:
- Which features people rely on
- Where experience degrades
- Where AI is adopted or ignored.
Proactive insight changes the conversation. Instead of reacting to cost creep, teams prevent it in advance. They see where costs are likely to grow, and change direction before that happens.
Step 5: Measuring ROI Without Falling Into the Calculator Trap
When UC costs rise, the instinct is to reach for an ROI calculator. Plug in headcount. Estimate time saved. Produce a tidy percentage. It looks rigorous. It also skips the part that actually matters: whether your tools are actually changing things that matter.
The problem with calculator-style ROI is that it assumes value shows up evenly. It doesn’t. Collaboration value is lumpy. It appears in some workflows and not others. It helps certain teams dramatically and barely touches the rest.
So instead of asking, “What’s the ROI of our collaboration stack?” better questions surface real insight:
- Are decisions happening faster, or are we just documenting delays more efficiently?
- Are people switching between fewer tools to get work done?
- Are meetings producing clearer outcomes, or just cleaner summaries?
- Are customer-facing teams resolving issues faster because internal handoffs improved?
These signals show up in behavior. Instead of asking “How much did we save?”, ask “How much better are our teams thanks to these tools?”
There’s also another concept that matters more than raw ROI: value density. How much real impact do you get per dollar spent? A smaller, well-adopted feature that cuts rework beats a sprawling AI toolkit no one trusts.
Future Trends: Where Collaboration Inflation Is Headed
If you’re hoping collaboration inflation settles down on its own, it won’t. The forces pushing UC costs up are baked into where collaboration platforms are going next.
First, AI features will naturally increase. They already are. We’ve gone from AI tools that summarize meetings to Agentic AI team members and comprehensive toolkits offered by virtually every UC platform provider.
Unfortunately, AI being added as a default layer to collaboration tools doesn’t make it cheaper. It means it gets harder to separate from core licensing. AI is moving from “extra” to “assumed,” which resets collaboration pricing expectations across the board. Once AI becomes table stakes, walking it back isn’t realistic.
Predictive collaboration is the next shift, whether teams feel ready for it or not. We’re moving past tools that simply capture what happened toward systems that start nudging what should happen next. Priorities pulled out of meetings. Risks surfaced before anyone raises a hand. Tasks spun up automatically, sometimes before there’s full agreement. That’s powerful, but it adds another layer to collaboration TCO. More data, more governance, more dependence on system outputs.
How companies budget for UC and collaboration tools is changing, too. Our research this year found more collaboration projects being justified through customer experience budgets. That makes sense. Internal collaboration failures show up externally. But it also means higher expectations. If collaboration spend is tied to CX outcomes, vague value stories won’t survive budget reviews.
Finally, verticalized UC changes the math. Industry-specific compliance, workflows, and integrations raise value for some teams while increasing complexity and cost for everyone else. The costs of collaboration tools won’t flatten. They’ll diverge.
Spend will keep rising. Patience for unclear value won’t.
Collaboration Inflation Is Real, but Manageable
Rising collaboration spend didn’t sneak up on anyone. It arrived in plain sight, one upgrade at a time.
Platform expansion made sense. AI monetization followed real cost pressures. Bundled pricing simplified buying. Operational complexity crept in quietly. Add it all together, and collaboration inflation becomes an obvious outcome.
What’s striking is how rarely the conversation keeps up with reality. Teams still debate licence counts while the real UC costs sit underused features, overlapping tools, admin overhead, weak service visibility, and AI capabilities no one quite trusts yet. The costs of collaboration tools rise even when headcount and adoption don’t.
AI raises the ceiling on value and waste at the same time. When adoption is intentional, collaboration improves. When it isn’t, spend grows faster than confidence. More capability doesn’t automatically mean better work.
The organizations that get ahead of collaboration pricing pressure don’t chase savings for their own sake. They tie spending to outcomes people recognize. They track adoption honestly. They invest in visibility and service management so problems surface early, not at renewal time.
Collaboration TCO doesn’t need to spiral. But it does need ownership. If you need help getting ahead, our ultimate guide to unified communications and collaboration is a good start. It’s where you get your first look at what platforms are turning into this year, and how the costs are going to change.
