Despite economic headwinds, companies plan to invest in technology in 2023
Kathryn Guarini CIO
December 15, 2022
Despite continued concerns about the global economy, technology spending is expected to remain strong next year. This is a theme that emerged from a recent study commissioned by IBM from Morning Consult. The report delves into the investment strategies of 4,000 global business leaders, with more than three-quarters planning to prioritize or invest in technology in the next 12 months, with the pace expected to stabilize from 2022. It turned out that
Looking ahead to 2023, technology buyers will invest in infrastructure, build AI services on top of that infrastructure to improve the employee and customer experience, secure the entire digital ecosystem, and deploy AI services across the business. has clear direction and a comprehensive plan to increase sustainability and resilience.
Investing in better infrastructure
We see investments in cloud computing (32%) and hardware (25%) focused on building resilient infrastructure. It's clear that enterprises are not fully committed to the public cloud and are looking for flexibility in where they can move their workloads. As more data is stored and processed on devices around the world, it becomes increasingly important to have clear data controls in place. In 2023, technology leaders will increase efforts to adopt unified data fabric architectures to manage distributed data using a common set of processes and deploy workloads across environments regardless of physical location. . This creates an environment that fosters business innovation by providing data to the right team members when needed.
Businesses also cited industry cloud platforms (25%) as the top emerging technology that they believe will have the greatest impact on their business over the next three to five years. Data may also be stored and processed within a changing regulatory environment. Our findings show that legal and regulatory compliance pressures are both driving (22%) and hindering (20%) technology investments. When it comes to staying ahead of cloud trends, industry-specific clouds offer even greater incentives for investment, as companies in highly regulated industries such as financial services, communications, and healthcare seek cloud providers that understand their unique needs. bring. In the future, many will likely choose the cloud, which enables secure environments built on interoperable, hybrid, and open architectures.
Businesses are deploying AI and automation services to power teams and workflows
Many companies plan to build services such as AI (33%), automation (24%), and chatbots (20%) on top of their infrastructure. Approximately 3 in 4 of his companies say these investments will increase the profitability of their businesses. This is an important indicator of continued investment even as companies face strong economic headwinds. Looking to the future, survey respondents specifically cited the digital workforce (35%) and generative AI (35%) as the top emerging technologies that will most transform business over the next three to five years.
A digital workforce can help business workers enhance the way they manage their day-to-day operations. These AI-powered assistants can help improve employee productivity by doing everything from HR tasks like job and department transfers to automating financial management and invoice processing to speeding up IT support. . By automating these business processes, the digital workforce frees up employee time for higher-value work.
Office life is going to be upgraded, and so is AI. Investing in generative AI and the underlying models that support it will revolutionize the way AI models are built and output generated. Traditionally, training AI has often involved creating and deploying new systems for different use cases, often requiring significant time and resources. The rise of foundational models means a shift to flexible, reusable AI models that can be applied to tasks in almost any field or industry. As these models move from exciting experiments like ChatGPT to enterprise technology products, more companies will be able to deploy AI in a wide range of mission-critical situations. As AI adoption continues to expand, the need for comprehensive data and AI governance strategies will become even more important.
Business leaders know they can't afford to be unprepared for cyber incidents
While businesses invest in digital infrastructure and AI, cybersecurity risks remain. After accelerating the adoption of new technologies and tools to support remote workers during the pandemic, companies saw an increase in the frequency of cyber-attacks impacting their business. This brings the average cost of a data breach to an all-time high of $4.35 million.
Given the looming threats, it's no surprise that cyber risk is both the biggest driver and the biggest barrier to technology investment, making cybersecurity (36 %) has been pushed to second place. This data shows that the world's business leaders view cybersecurity as a critical part of their IT strategy, rather than an afterthought in technology. In doing so, you will see exciting new solutions that combine the best of cybersecurity and AI.
Investing in sustainability makes your business more resilient and more profitable
Sustainability is set to grow as an investment priority over the next 12 months. Three in five companies plan to increase or prioritize spending on environmental, social and governance goals next year. This was 57% over the previous 12 months. Much of that spending is a response to environmental pressures, such as reducing emissions and meeting ESG targets, with the second-highest pressure driving investment in technology overall.
Business leaders are beginning to recognize the role that enterprise IT itself plays not only in contributing to a company's environmental concerns, but also as an effective way to address sustainability. IT leaders are adopting sustainable cloud and computing to reduce e-waste and ensure that IT can also become a key enabler of data and insights that help companies achieve their sustainability goals. By doing so, you are participating in the promotion of a more sustainable business.
Only time will tell how well actual spending matches these projections. In the meantime, this survey provides important insight into how many business leaders plan to allocate resources at a time when they are preparing for a challenging year ahead. It is something.
