Research
CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities Study
For over 15 years, 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 271 IT decision-makers across the globe.
86%
of ITDMs expect their budget to increase or remain steady over the next year
70%
of ITDMs cite an increase in spending on AI-enabled technology over the next 12 months
64%
of ITDMs say that cybersecurity protection is their top area of improvement over the next year
Key findings
Making room for AI in the tech budget
While still largely in the researching or piloting stages, 70% of ITDMs anticipate increasing their spending towards AI-enabled technology over the next 12 months. This is because they see AI as the single most important IT project right now, cited by 29% of ITDMs, up 23 percentage points from just 6% the year prior. More specifically, ITDMs anticipate their organization will use AI/ML tools to transform the business in the next three to five years for things like process automation and efficiency, enhancing the customer experience, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and risk management/fraud detection.
IT leaders facing challenges
With AI now joining cybersecurity as a top priority for ITDMs this year, IT budgets may not be keeping pace with what’s expected of this department, as 43% say lack of budget was their main obstacle to new tech adoption over the past year. Resistance to change within the organization and shortage of staff followed as the second greatest challenges to new tech deployment (34%), followed by lack of appropriate skillsets for deployment (32%).
Cybersecurity improvements still on the horizon
64% of respondents agree that cybersecurity protection is key area of improvement that they need to focus on in the next year. In fact, of the 80% of ITDMs anticipating to partner with a technology vendor this year, 46% specified that those relationships will be aimed at strengthening their cybersecurity protection. Looking into the specific cybersecurity tools ITDMs are actively researching this year, the research found that behavior monitoring and analysis technology, Zero Trust, Container security, Cloud data protection and DevSecOps tools are among the top.
More CIO resources
This year’s CIO Tech Poll finds that ITDMs consider AI their most important priority, while cybersecurity improvements continue to claim healthy portions of budgets and attention.
CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities press release
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