Unused licenses are the quietest line item in most software budgets. Seats get provisioned for a project, a team, or a person who has since moved on, and no signal ever tells anyone to reclaim them. The cost compounds silently, renewal after renewal.
The fix is to compare what is provisioned against what is actually used, continuously. A seat that has not been touched in 60 or 90 days is a candidate, not a certainty — context matters, and the goal is to recover waste without disrupting the people who need access.
Route reclaim decisions to the application owner rather than making them centrally. They know whether a quiet account is dormant or seasonal, and involving them keeps trust intact while still recovering real budget before the next renewal.