What’s the magic word? When it comes to budget approvals, it’s ‘AI’

Like the youngest sibling in the family, AI-related initiatives are getting whatever they want—which, in most cases, is a budget to get the job done.

According to a December report by Emburse, which builds expense and travel management software, 58% of surveyed US and UK business leaders believe AI-related purchases are the easiest to approve. And business leaders are using this information to their advantage: More than six in 10 (62%) claim to have linked at least one software purchase to an AI initiative to get budget approvals.

Fast pass. Michele Shepard, Emburse’s CRO, told IT Brew that while AI projects may have initially gotten easy approvals as companies bought into industry hype over the technology, business leaders are now funding projects because of their long-term benefits.

“Initially…it was, ‘Oh, it’s the next cool thing,’” Shepard said. “But the reality is, it is driving significant cost benefit, ROI, real efficiency savings for organizations.”

Shepard compared companies’ current AI efforts to when the tech industry moved from on-premise to SaaS solutions.

One IT pro begs to differ! Despite Emburse’s findings, not all IT professionals think AI is the magic word in budget approvals. Ed Frederici, CTO at software company Appfire, told IT Brew his company’s budget for AI projects is expected to triple in 2026. But despite this increased budget, Frederici believes getting budget approvals for AI-related projects may actually be harder compared to non-AI purchases, because the buzz around the technology requires a greater need to prove the value of proposed investments.

“We tend to slow down just fractionally the approval of AI projects to make sure that we have all our ducks in a row to better ensure a good outcome,” he said.

“What does happen is when you throw the term ‘AI’ into something, it jumps the priority chain. It might get looked at sooner, but it goes under the same amount of rigor,” he added.

Watch out. Although business leaders increasingly understand the potential value of AI, Shepard warned, they need to consider how a newly approved software will fit into their overall tech stack.

“Using AI in a silo is going to get you far, but not as far as aggregating that intelligence across multiple applications.”