Research
CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities Study
This survey aims to understand how organizations plan to allocate their IT budgets and focus their tech adoption strategies over the coming year. This year’s study surveyed 269 IT decision-makers across the globe.
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of ITDMs expect their budget to increase or remain steady over the next year.
of ITDMs cite an increase in spending on AI for cybersecurity over the next 12 months.
of ITDMs say up-skilling existing talent to ensure IT skill sets can keep pace with new technology implementations has increased in importance over the past year.
Key findings
AI is rapidly moving from experimentation to execution
The CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities Study shows that 58% of IT leaders say AI/ML, agentic AI, and generative AI have the greatest potential to significantly alter how their businesses operate. That impact is already taking shape across core business functions. More than a third of IT decision-makers point to improved decision-making through predictive and real-time analytics (37%) as AI’s top contribution, followed closely by risk detection and management (33%) and process automation to improve efficiency and reduce costs (32%).
Adoption is also further along than many might expect. Nearly half of IT leaders (47%) report having AI-enabled technology in production use in at least one business unit, and generative AI specifically is already deployed by 53% of organizations. While agentic AI is still emerging, it leads all AI categories in research interest, signaling what’s next in enterprise automation and orchestration.
AI is driving both technology investment and buying behavior
Seventy-one percent of IT leaders plan to increase their investment in AI-enabled technology over the next 12 months, making AI the top area of increased spending. At the same time, AI is reshaping how technology decisions are made: 44% of IT leaders now use AI tools to research and evaluate vendors, ranking it ahead of peer recommendations, analyst research, and product demos as the most commonly used discovery method.
This momentum reflects deeper engagement with advanced AI capabilities. While generative AI continues to expand, more sophisticated approaches are gaining traction. Twenty-eight percent of IT decision-makers are actively researching advanced AI technologies, with agentic AI leading all AI categories in research activity, signaling growing interest in more autonomous, decision-driven systems. Investment plans reinforce this shift, as 62% of organizations expect to increase spending on generative AI and 58% plan to invest more in agentic AI, underscoring that AI adoption is moving well beyond experimentation.
Security concerns remain the primary barrier to technology adoption.
Even as IT leaders accelerate investment in new technologies, security continues to be the dominant constraint. The CIO Tech Poll Study shows that security concerns rank as the number one challenge IT leaders face when deploying new technology, outpacing issues like skills gaps, integration complexity, and budget limitations.
This reality is shaping how organizations evaluate and implement innovation. As AI-enabled systems, cloud architectures, and data-driven tools become more deeply embedded across the enterprise, IT decision-makers are increasingly focused on protecting expanded attack surfaces, managing risk, and ensuring resilience without slowing progress.
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