Brex overhauled its AI tool buying process after its old slow sales cycle nearly killed adoption.
The issue started after ChatGPT’s debut. Brex tried piloting AI tools using its usual months-long procurement. It failed. Teams lost interest before approvals finished.
Soon after, Brex scrapped the old playbook. The startup created new fast-track data and legal checks for AI software. This sped up vetting and testing of tools. 
Brex CTO James Reggio told TechCrunch at HumanX AI in March that the company uses a “superhuman product-market-fit test” to judge which tools deserve investment beyond pilots. This means more power to employees who actually use the tools.
Brex CTO James Reggio stated:
“In the first year following ChatGPT, when all these new tools were coming on the scene, the process itself of procuring would actually run so long that the teams that were asking to procure a tool lost interest in the tool by the time that we actually got through all of the necessary internal controls.”
“We go deep with the folks who are getting the most value out of the tool to figure out whether it is actually unique enough to retain. We’re basically, I would say, about two years into this new era where there’s 1,000 AI tools within our company. And we’ve definitely canceled and not renewed on maybe five to 10 different larger deployments.”
Brex now gives engineers a $50 monthly budget to pick tools from an approved list. Spending power moves directly to users for faster, smarter choices.
Reggio added:
“By delegating that spending authority to the individuals who are going to be leveraging this, they make the optimal decisions for optimizing their workflows. It’s actually really interesting and we haven’t seen a convergence. I think that that has also validated the decision to make it easy to try a bunch of different tools, is that we haven’t seen everybody just rush in and say, ‘I want Cursor.’”
The new approach helps Brex map which tools need enterprise licenses based on actual user counts.
The takeaway? Reggio says companies should “embrace the messiness” of today’s AI tool explosion. Don’t overthink.
Reggio concluded:
“Knowing that you’re not going to always make the right decision out of the gate is just like paramount to making sure that you don’t get left behind. I think that the one mistake that we could make is to overthink this and spend six to nine months evaluating everything very carefully before we deploy it. And you don’t know what the world is going to look like nine months from now.”
Brex’s fast procurement shift lets it keep pace with the AI tool flood — while most companies still lag behind.
