AI will eat a fifth of tech budgets in 2027, but don't expect it to pay for itself
Forrester says only isolated wins are likely, while 'good enough' open-weight models soak up the tokens
A new report from Forrester predicts that artificial intelligence (AI) will consume a fifth of all business technology budgets by 2027. However, CIOs are currently struggling to meet their AI-related return on investment (ROI) targets, with only 22% reporting positive AI impact on EBITDA in the past year. The analyst firm warns that isolated AI use cases may achieve positive ROI, but whole programs will fall short, highlighting the need for organizational changes to drive firmwide results.
Despite challenges, tech leaders are expected to adapt and invest in open-weight generative AI (GenAI) models, which offer comparable performance to leading proprietary systems at a lower cost. Open-weight models like Gemma, Llama, and Qwen are projected to represent half of AI tokens, while frontier models will be reserved for critical tasks where errors are costly. This shift towards open-weight models is expected to increase pressure on leaders to prove AI's value while managing costs, infrastructure, and risk.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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