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Like newlyweds with a Williams Sonoma gift card, CIOs and CISOs have money to spend in 2024. With satisfying balances, today’s chief officers are considering emerging (and defensive) technologies.
Avasant Research, in a poll of 371 US and Canada-based IT organizations during the first half of 2024, reported “healthy, if not stellar” rates of budget increase. In all sectors: IT budgets increased, on median, by 3%—a slight dip from numbers in 2022 and 2023 (high inflation years, warned the report), but in line with the 3% growth from in 2021 and 2020.
“Never have CIOs had such a chance to make such a large impact,” Avasant wrote in its report.
More than 68% of respondents reported both “AI” and “data analytics” as spending initiatives; other top priorities included legacy systems and disaster recovery efforts.
Regarding “AI” examples, David Wagner, senior director at Avasant Research, said he’s seen “very high” investment in “copilots,” large language model-powered tools supporting work tasks like the creation of a presentation or email; Wagner also sees investments in AI-led human assistance like intelligence processing of document sets.
The interest in emerging tech gives Wagner the confidence to predict continued IT budget increases.
“Assuming the economy doesn’t change this, or a global conflict doesn’t change this, I’d expect three to five years of stable, reasonable growth, where companies are investing in the kinds of technology that allow them to become more efficient while still delivering more services to the business,” Wagner told us.
IANS Research and Artico Search, in a 2024 survey of 755 CISOs in the US and Canada, see security budget increases; it found that average security spend growth rose from 6% in 2023 to 8% this year—another perhaps healthy-if-not-stellar figure considering growth numbers in 2022 and 2021 were 17% and 16% respectively.
“Data is so much a part of how every company is driving their revenue models now, and gathering more consumer data is a huge component of that, and there’s just no way to escape the need to protect that at a baseline level,” Nick Kakolowski, senior research director at IANS, told us, regarding IT budget growth he considers steady and incremental.
Budgets have remained steady as the unemployment rate for IT workers rose to 6% in August, up from 5.6% during the previous month. While consulting firm Janco Associates found IT unemployment rates surpassing national jobless rates for seven of the last eight months, pros like Steve Watt, chief information officer of Hyland Software, see promise in both emerging and defensive tech.
“The roles that are most in demand right now are roles where candidates have expertise in security, AI and the cloud,” Watt told the Wall Street Journal in September.
As IT departments invest in productivity-enhancing tools, and businesses do more with less (and less people), Wagner said, the IT team remains essential when almost every sector has a digital business plan.
“That puts IT at the forefront of driving change,” he said.