Your License Audit Stops at Microsoft 365 — Adobe and Autodesk Don't

Ask an IT admin how many unused Microsoft 365 licenses they're carrying and, increasingly, they'll have an actual number — the audit habit has caught on. Ask the same admin how many unused Adobe Creative Cloud or Autodesk seats they're carrying, and the answer is almost always a shrug. The scrutiny that M365 gets rarely extends to the other line items on the software budget, even though the per-seat cost is often higher.

Why these two get skipped

It's not negligence — it's structural. M365 usage reports live in one admin center everyone already has open. Adobe and Autodesk licensing lives in separate admin consoles that IT often doesn't own outright — creative or engineering teams manage their own seats, sometimes through a reseller, with IT only handling the invoice. Nobody owns the join between "who has a seat" and "who used it" because no single team owns both halves.

That gap is expensive. A Creative Cloud All Apps seat runs roughly $65–90/user/month; an AutoCAD or Revit subscription can run $235–315/user/month. Waste here isn't a rounding error — a handful of idle seats can outweigh a whole department's worth of unused M365 E3 licenses.

Adobe: assignment data exists, activity data mostly doesn't

Adobe's admin console (and the underlying User Management API) tells you cleanly who holds which product profile and how many seats a plan has consumed versus its quota. What it does not give you is genuine app-open activity — there's no "last time this person opened Photoshop" report the way Microsoft gives you sign-in activity. Waste-hunting in Adobe is therefore assignment-based, not usage-based:

• Compare headcount to seat count. Pull the roster of everyone with a Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, or Acrobat license and cross-check it against current employees and their actual role. A seat assigned to someone who left, moved teams, or was never a designer in the first place is the easiest win.
• Watch for licenses assigned during onboarding templates. The same "copy the last person's licenses" pattern that inflates M365 seats does it here too — new hires inherit a Creative Cloud seat because the IT template includes it, not because their role needs it.
• Check for single-app vs. All Apps mismatches. Someone who only touches Acrobat doesn't need an All Apps seat at 3–4x the price.

Autodesk: usage data actually exists, if you're on the right plan

Autodesk is the more solvable half of this problem — genuine usage telemetry exists via the Business Success Plan Reporting API and Token Flex usage data, covering per-product, per-user activity for AutoCAD, Revit, 3ds Max, Maya, and the rest of the portfolio. The catch: it requires being on a Business Success Plan or Flex token model, which many mid-size firms aren't, leaving them with assignment data only, the same as Adobe.

Where usage data is available, the same 90-day-inactivity logic that works for M365 applies directly:

• Named-user subscriptions with zero launches in 60–90 days are pure waste at $200+/month each
• Flex/token consumption that's trending toward zero for a user is a signal to move them to pay-per-use instead of a named seat
• Seasonal contractors (common in AEC firms) are the classic case — a seat provisioned for a project that wrapped six months ago

The audit habit, applied consistently

None of this requires new tooling to start — it requires applying the discipline you already use for M365 to the rest of the software budget:

1. Pull the roster for every per-seat product IT pays for, not just Microsoft's.
2. Cross-check against current headcount and role, quarterly, the same cadence as the M365 checklist.
3. Reclaim before renewal, since most of these vendors — like Microsoft's NCE — restrict mid-term reductions.

The tenants carrying the most shelfware aren't the ones ignoring license audits. They're the ones running a great audit on one vendor and none at all on the other two.

We built SeatPrune for Microsoft 365 first because that's where every organisation starts. Adobe and Autodesk connectors are next on the roadmap — until then, the manual version above catches the same waste.