Exclusive insights from last week’s roundtable
The global IT landscape in 2025 is defined by both ambition and anxiety. On one hand, Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending to surpass $5.1 trillion this year, an increase of 6.8% over 2024. On the other, senior decision-makers are applying unprecedented scrutiny to how budgets are allocated.
At our exclusive DACH executive roundtable last week, senior leaders from large enterprises across industries revealed what is really driving their investment decisions. Their message was clear: the era of buying technology for technology’s sake is over. Every euro, dollar, or pound invested must link directly to business outcomes, governance structures, and cultural adoption.
For IT vendors, the implications are profound. Winning deals in 2025 depends on demonstrating not only technical capability but also measurable ROI, risk mitigation, and cultural fit.
This article unpacks the five dominant IT investment priorities shaping enterprise strategies, and explains how vendors must align if they want to be viewed as partners rather than providers.
The IT budget landscape: Where the money goes
Executives last week shared candid breakdowns of their 2025 IT budgets. The distribution shows a striking shift: cultural adoption and risk management now claim as much investment as bleeding-edge technology.
Enterprise IT budget distribution for 2025 (exclusive roundtable + market data)
| Category | % of Budget | Roundtable Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cybersecurity | 27% | “A non-negotiable line item — survival cost, not discretionary spend.” |
| Cloud & Infrastructure | 22% | Migration accelerating, but concerns over hidden costs dominate. |
| Data & Analytics | 19% | Dashboard fatigue; adoption requires storytelling, not just metrics. |
| AI & Automation | 17% | Pilots cut back; only ROI-proven projects survive budget scrutiny. |
| Change Management & Training | 15% | Up to one-quarter of transformation spend redirected to cultural adoption. |
1. Artificial intelligence adoption: ROI or nothing
AI is still the most talked-about technology, but enthusiasm is tempered by hard financial discipline. Executives repeatedly emphasised: “If we can’t show ROI in 12–18 months, the project doesn’t survive.”
Roundtable insights:
- Many organisations admitted they had reduced AI pilots by as much as 60% in the last year, cutting non-essential experiments.
- A dual approach dominates: top-down, strategic AI initiatives (aligned with board-level priorities) combined with bottom-up use cases developed by specific business units.
- The talent shortage has shifted: the real gap is for AI specialists with business acumen. Leaders warned that technical talent without domain knowledge often produces irrelevant or low-value outputs.
Key statistics:
- 52% of enterprises globally say demonstrating AI ROI is their biggest adoption challenge (Deloitte, 2024).
- 41% have paused or cancelled generative AI pilots due to cost overruns or unclear outcomes.
- Yet, 74% of leaders still believe AI will be their most transformative investment over the next three years.
Vendor takeaway:
AI vendors must show their maths. That means ROI models with clear baselines: cost savings, time reductions, or revenue growth. Promises of “innovation potential” will no longer unlock budget.
2. Cloud migration: governance and cost anxieties
Cloud remains a centrepiece of digital transformation, but executives voiced deep concern over spiralling costs and compliance risks. One senior leader bluntly said: “We budgeted 20% extra for hidden cloud costs, and even that may not be enough.”
Roundtable insights:
- Unexpected transfer costs were cited by over half the participants, especially for video and analytics workloads.
- To address governance, many organisations are forming “cloud nuclei” teams: small, cross-functional groups combining IT, digital, and finance expertise.
- Vendor lock-in anxiety is growing: leaders see high switching costs as a long-term strategic risk.
Cloud priorities from the roundtable
| Cloud Investment Priority | % of Executives Citing It | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cost predictability | 72% | Hidden costs derail budget forecasts |
| Governance frameworks | 65% | Small “cloud nuclei” emerging |
| Security & immutable backups | 58% | Ransomware resilience a board-level demand |
| Multi-cloud flexibility | 54% | Lock-in concerns rising |
| User adoption & training | 41% | Cultural change needed for full ROI |
Vendor takeaway:
Cloud vendors cannot just sell scalability. What clients demand in 2025 are predictable cost models, robust governance frameworks, and flexible exit strategies.
3. Cybersecurity: the non-negotiable spend
Unlike AI or cloud, cybersecurity is described as “the untouchable budget.” Every executive agreed it is treated as a survival cost, not a discretionary investment.
Roundtable insights:
- Human risk dominates: executives agreed that despite advanced tools, phishing and social engineering remain the top attack vectors.
- The attack surface is expanding: organisations must defend digital, physical, and human vulnerabilities simultaneously.
- Third-party risk is rising: multiple participants cited supplier or SaaS vendor breaches as their most disruptive incidents in the last year.
Key statistics:
- 82% of breaches involve human error (Verizon DBIR 2024).
- 56% of executives report increasing investment in human risk training this year.
- 71% of organisations are demanding stricter assurances from their IT vendors post high-profile third-party breaches.
Vendor takeaway:
Cybersecurity must be embedded by design. Vendors that treat it as a bolt-on feature risk being excluded from RFPs altogether.
4. Data culture: bridging rhetoric and reality
Every executive described their organisation as “data-driven,” but the discussion revealed a striking gap between rhetoric and reality.
Roundtable insights:
- Dashboard fatigue is real: leaders admitted up to 40% of BI dashboards go unused.
- Adoption is slowed by preference for Excel or Google Sheets among frontline staff.
- Data governance challenges continue: poor quality and siloed ownership undermine trust.
- What works best? Storytelling and contextualisation. Dashboards succeed only when linked directly to business impact.
Key statistics:
- 67% of executives say data quality issues undermine AI initiatives.
- 43% of staff still prefer manual tools (spreadsheets) over centralised BI systems.
- Enterprises with strong data governance see 25–30% faster adoption of AI-driven tools.
Vendor takeaway:
Analytics solutions must reduce friction, integrate into existing workflows, and demonstrate business impact in plain language. Vendors who provide adoption support, not just dashboards, gain a competitive edge.
5. Change management: the hidden investment priority
Perhaps the most striking insight from the roundtable was the scale of investment now flowing into change management.
Roundtable insights:
- Executives revealed that up to a quarter of digital transformation budgets are now reserved for cultural adoption, training, and communication.
- Pilot-first approaches dominate: leaders prefer small, high-visibility successes over risky big-bang rollouts.
- Internal champions, often drawn from frontline teams, are outperforming external consultants in driving adoption.
- Failed projects often trace back to weak leadership ownership and lack of measurable progress tracking.
Key statistics:
- 73% of digital transformation failures are attributed to poor change management (McKinsey, 2024).
- Enterprises that use internal champions report 30% higher adoption rates.
- 62% of executives now factor cultural change explicitly into IT vendor evaluations.
Vendor takeaway:
Vendors must position themselves as partners in change management, not just technology suppliers. Offering training programmes, adoption frameworks, and measurement tools can make the difference between winning or losing enterprise deals.
Barriers to IT investment adoption
The executives last week also revealed the top blockers slowing IT transformation, many of which are overlooked in vendor pitches.
Top barriers to IT investment adoption in 2025 (exclusive roundtable)
| Barrier | % of Executives Highlighting |
|---|---|
| Hidden cloud costs | 68% |
| Cultural resistance to change | 61% |
| Talent shortages (AI & data) | 57% |
| Regulatory/compliance hurdles | 52% |
| Unclear ROI metrics | 49% |
| Vendor lock-in anxiety | 46% |
| Legacy systems integration | 44% |
For vendors, recognising these barriers and offering practical mitigations is often more compelling than leading with technical specs.
What IT vendors must learn
The key message from last week’s roundtable is simple: enterprises are buying outcomes, not tools.
- AI must prove ROI.
- Cloud must deliver cost control and governance.
- Cybersecurity must be embedded everywhere.
- Data must be contextualised, not just collected.
- Change management must be funded and supported.
Vendors who fail to align with these priorities risk being sidelined as “just another supplier.” Those who embed ROI models, governance, resilience, and cultural adoption into their value propositions will instead become strategic partners in enterprise transformation.