Surveying 271 IT decision-makers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, Foundry’s CIO Tech Poll finds an upward trend in tech budgets, with a significant emphasis on cybersecurity and AI investment. Amidst budget increases, IT leaders face challenges like underfunding and skill shortages, highlighting the importance of upskilling and AI research.
Tech budgets are expected to continue rising in 2024. Just 14% of respondents said that they would be cutting down on IT spending, while 86% of respondents said their budgets will either rise (54%) or stay the same (32%).
The annual CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities Study has been issued by Foundry, the media, data, and martech business of IDG and publisher of CIO.com. For the coming year, the survey examines how businesses intend to spend their IT expenditures and concentrate their tech adoption initiatives.
“For more than fifteen years, CIO has explored the technology priorities of IT leaders through the CIO Tech Poll study,” said Amy Bennett, Global Editor in Chief at Foundry. “Over the years, cybersecurity initiatives have consistently consumed a significant share of IT’s budget and time, and this year is no different. But now IT leaders are carving out space for AI, with most saying they are increasing their investment in and exploring AI tools and technologies. This is new and rapidly advancing territory, and IT decision-makers will need to find a balance between investments in technology innovation and operations.”
AI Overtaking Cybersecurity
This year, AI has overtaken cybersecurity as the top priority for IT Decision Makers (ITDMs), suggesting that IT funds aren’t keeping up with the department’s expectations. While 86% of respondents mentioned stable or increasing budgets this year, 43% still identify budget scarcity as the primary barrier to the adoption of new technology during the last 12 months.
The two biggest obstacles to the implementation of new technology were personnel shortages and organizational resistance to change (34% and 32%, respectively), and inadequate skill sets for the job. In order to stay up to date and successfully implement new technologies, ITDMs are therefore putting a greater emphasis on reskilling (63%) and upskilling (70%) current people.
ITDMs are experiencing the AI craze in 2024, as AI-related projects are vying for IT executives’ time and attention as well as tech money. IT executives set aside a large amount of time and money for AI research and implementation. AI-enabled technology was cited by 29% of respondents as their most significant technological project this year, up 23 percentage points from only 6% the year before and expected to lead the list in 2024. Additionally, 64% of respondents said AI had the most potential to drastically change how their company runs.
With 70% of researchers now investigating or testing new projects in that field, AI-enabled technology is at the top of the list of technologies under active investigation. The second-place option, data-modeling tools to help internal AI/ML initiatives, scored 60%, indicating that IT executives are realizing how critical it is to have a strong data infrastructure in order to facilitate AI.
In 2024, there will be a notable shift in tech investment towards artificial intelligence (AI). Of the areas getting greater investment, 70% will go towards AI, while 68% will go toward cybersecurity. In contrast, AI was included in the 2023 research as the sector experiencing the fourth-highest growth in investment, at 45%. A year later, this is a startling 35 percentage point gain.
Cybersecurity Ranks Just Behind AI in 2024 Strategic Priorities
Cybersecurity remains a top issue for IT leaders, notwithstanding the notable rise in AI investment projected for 2024. 64% of respondents agree that cybersecurity protection is the most critical area of development they need to concentrate on in the next 12 months, despite AI-related projects being selected as the most significant project for this year. Furthermore, resolving cybersecurity issues was the top distraction, diverting CIOs’ attention from creative and strategic work, according to Foundry’s newly published State of the CIO report.
Additionally, cybersecurity was mentioned as having received the second-highest increase in investment this year at 68%, a minor rise from 65% the previous year, when cybersecurity topped the list by 16 percentage points (with BI/Analytics tools coming in second at 49%).
Forty-six percent of the ITDMs who expect to work with a technology vendor this year said that the purpose of such partnerships is to bolster cybersecurity defenses. Upon examining the particular cybersecurity products that ITDMs are now investigating, the most popular ones are DevSecOps tools (25%) and behavior monitoring & analysis (35%), followed by Zero Trust (33%), container security (28%), and cloud data protection (26%).
About the CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities Study
The goal of the 2024 CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities research was to find out which technological areas IT executives are most interested in over the next year and to gauge the direction of investment in those areas. The survey was sent online to Foundry’s audience in January 2024. 271 IT decision-makers form the basis of the results. Every responder to the study is engaged in the process of making large purchases of security or IT goods and services.
Companies represented by respondents are mostly based in North America (50%) with a small percentage also in Europe (23%) and the Asia-Pacific region (23%). The industries from which these firms are drawn include technology, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and services. The average revenue of the respondents’ enterprises is $5.36 billion, with 13,405 workers.
