Chasing down AI spend is the key to tech revolution

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Header: 59% of professionals spend 11+ hours a week chasing information across systems.†

Copy: This guide breaks down how to connect context across tools and keep work moving.

†Quickbase, 2025

When it comes to putting money into the tech stack, enterprises are putting their money where the AI is—but that spend largely isn’t finding its way to IT budgets as the technology expands its footprint.

Businesses aren’t in a wait-and-see mode, said Vladimir Lukic, global leader for tech and digital advantage at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The chase for agentic success reminds him of Mad Max: Fury Road, where Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, in a huge “war rig,” are pursued across the desert by marauders anxious for glory and loot.

“All the vehicles are moving after that runaway truck,” Lukic said. “Will all of those chasers get there? No, but what we are seeing is the level of energy is real. The target is real. They know that they’re going to deploy this at scale in their business.”

High ceiling. Leaders are buying into the potential of the technology, Lukic added, and those who have leaned into deployment are better set up than laggards. For their enterprises, this means more spend; on the implementation side, those with a head start are outperforming their peers.

Enterprises are still facing uncertainty when it comes to AI investment, in part because of questions around insufficiency of financial outlay. The disconnect between targets for short-term returns on the part of finance teams and the reality of the technology’s capabilities can present issues. That’s ultimately pressure on the IT team, as NinjaOne CTO Mike Arrowsmith explained in July.

“A lot of those cost optimizations are just simply shifting to the AI providers themselves,” Arrowsmith told IT Brew. “Any savings that we would have by eliminating legacy tooling, we’re just shoving into AI to be able to accelerate our adoption and use cases within those platforms.”

Run the numbers. BCG’s Applied AI Index 2026, released September 30, found that companies doubled their AI spend to 3.3% of revenue year over year. With over 80% of that spending happening outside of the IT silo, the future of the technology in the enterprise overall is brighter—and less narrowly prescribed—than ever.

For those companies investing in AI, returns are projected years ahead—not the next quarter. BCG’s analysis shows that companies reinvesting profits into the technology will see a payoff in the future, possibly in 2030. That’s a 2.5-times increase over the laggards, BCG found.

Further, future-minded companies are expected to see a 12.9% increase in total revenue plus cost effect, as opposed to 5.8% for laggards.

“They’re deploying these tools, they are hiring advisors to help them deploy them, they are hiring legal teams to change the workflows, to use it in the right way,” Lukic said. “They’re engaging directly with hyperscalers and LLM providers to buy these solutions and services directly from them.”