Across boardrooms, one question keeps surfacing: is our expanding technology budget translating into results? 2025 brought big budgets and bigger expectations, yet many organisations didn’t see performance keep up with investment. In 2026, the winners won’t be those who spend the most, rather they’ll be the ones who convert spend into outcomes and business value.
That takes discipline: transparency and connection to business outcomes you can defend to the board, governance for AI, and Technology Business Management woven into everyday decisions.
The findings from our latest global survey report reinforce this reality. Executives are prioritising cybersecurity and AI while grappling with ROI confidence and data trust. The path forward is enterprise financial intelligence – an essential data layer that connects cost, usage, and value across finance, IT, and business. When teams share a single, defensible source of truth, decisions speed up, funding follows value, and innovation scales responsibly. But many leaders still wrestle with disconnected silos or unreliable data, making it harder to realise the value their technology investments are capable of delivering.
In our 2026 Technology Investment Management Report, we identify how investment planning has changed, where management capability still lags, and what executives should do to ensure value. Connecting the dots requires pragmatic steps: unify insights across the business, modernise IT financial management (ITFM) to enable better IT planning, optimise FinOps to unlock greater cloud value, streamline Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) for more effective resource allocation, and proactively govern AI innovations to drive measurable outcomes. Even amid heightened spend scrutiny, organisations can realise greater value from technology investments and create a sustainable competitive advantage.
Technology investment continues to grow—74% of survey respondents reported increased IT & software investment with 25% citing significant jumps—yet many leaders lack confidence in ability to translate investment into business outcomes. Investment ROI is increasingly coming up in customer discussions, but when financial and operational insights remain fragmented, decision-making slows and executive trust erodes. The challenge isn’t funding technology—it’s defending and directing it with clarity. Many organisations still rely on manual, disconnected processes that create a false sense of control until real-world demands expose the gaps.
Despite a growing priority around AI and cybersecurity, many leaders remain concerned about runaway costs. Our survey found that 67% of AI investment is expected to come from internal capital allocation within existing budgets, not net-new funding, putting pressure on teams to ensure they’re reallocating confidently.
Many organisations believe they have IT spend under control—that is, until priorities shift. When plans can’t adapt quickly or credibly, the gap between perceived control and actual capability becomes visible fast. In a world where innovation funding increasingly depends on internal trade-offs, the missing link is a connected picture across finance and operations. Without it, decisions slow, agility breaks down, and organisations struggle to fund their highest-value initiatives.
Cloud and AI are introducing unprecedented variability into technology spend. As consumption accelerates, traditional planning and accountability models are struggling to keep pace. Leaders are rethinking how visibility, ownership, and funding decisions work in more dynamic environments. Many are realising their capabilities can’t keep up with AI‑driven or containerised workloads, exposing the limitations of traditional methods for planning, managing, and forecasting innovation spend.
AI, cybersecurity, and digital modernisation are no longer “experimental”—they’re essential. But essential doesn’t mean unchecked. Executive teams are applying sharper discipline to how innovation is funded, measured, and scaled, focusing on outcomes rather than ambition alone. From my conversations with technology and finance leaders, boards now expect clear milestones, governance structures, and proof of value before green‑lighting scale. Objectivity trumps enthusiasm when securing investment for technology initiatives.
Leading organisations are moving beyond static reporting to real-time, data-driven insights. By aligning financial and operational data and tying investment to outcomes, they are making faster decisions, reallocating capital with confidence, and turning technology spend into a true competitive advantage. These themes represent only a glimpse of what’s shifting in 2026. Our full survey report expands on these trends with detailed analysis of how leaders are evolving their decision‑making capabilities. Download a copy to explore the full data and findings.
Ajay Patel is GM, Apptio, an IBM Company
“Budgets are up, confidence isn’t: 2026 global tech investment insights” was originally created and published by Retail Banker International, a GlobalData owned brand.
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