End of Year Purchases

This data was originally featured in the December 10th, 2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, December 10, 2025: Why Everyone Hates the CEO, End of Year Purchases

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about using generative AI to make smart end-of-year budget decisions.

As we head towards the end of the year, one of the most common pitches you’re going to get – even from us at Trust Insights – is: you’ve got some end-of-year budget that’s use it or lose it, so here are some things to spend it on. While we’d love to tell you to just buy our courses, books, and consulting services, there’s a far more strategic approach to take.

A better idea is to use generative AI to help you make those budget decisions strategically and thoughtfully.

Chances are, back in September and October, you did your annual planning for 2026. You looked at our past episodes about scenario planning and developed some scenarios for how the world might look and function next year. Maybe you grabbed a beverage of choice – mulled cider, sparkling apple cider – and thought through your goals and current performance.

Going back to the Trust Insights 5P Framework, think about what you want to accomplish.

This is a great time of year to do human capital inventory. Who are the people on your team? What skills do they have? Where are the gaps in your capabilities? What skills do you need to hire for, or need to develop internally?

You can conduct end-of-year performance reviews to evaluate – not to punish or be punitive, but to help people grow and develop professionally. Generative AI can assist with this entire process. You can review your processes, identify where things are most broken, discuss the frustrations you had over the year and what things really made you unhappy, celebrate what made you happy, recognize what worked well, and inventory your tools. What’s in your marketing tech stack? What’s in your AI tech stack? What are you paying for? How much? What are the capabilities of each tool?

Now you have the information you need. You capture all of this information with a voice memo app on your phone, recording your thoughts and observations as they come. Or use one of my personal favorite methods: grab your company credit card bill and see exactly what you’re paying for each tool and service. Put all that information into generative AI and ask a strategic question:

I have X dollars left in my budget, and here’s a menu of different options and things I could do based on the purpose, people, process, platform, and performance of this year and all the data I’ve supplied. Based on this menu of services from Trust Insights that covers all these different things, what should I invest in with this budget remnant to address the biggest problems we have in the most cost-efficient manner?

The AI might suggest several options. It could recommend getting a copy of my book for everyone to read. It might recommend buying 5 seats of Katie’s AI Strategist course for the 5 MVP players on your team. Or it could suggest bringing Trust Insights in for a half-day workshop to help your organization level up its capabilities.

Next, have generative AI score all these solutions in descending order – ranking the solutions that best fit your budget and address your priorities. You might have champagne problems but a beer budget, as the saying goes. The goal is straightforward: make sure your budget remnant actually addresses the real problems you’re facing.

The key takeaway here is this: don’t just accept vendor pitches at face value, including ours. Use generative AI to analyze your actual needs, your actual capabilities, your actual budget constraints, and make thoughtful, data-driven decisions about where to invest those final dollars of the year. Strategic budget allocation ensures you get maximum value from your budget remnant and set yourself up for success in the coming year.