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
Forrester predicts that AI will consume a fifth of all business technology spending in the coming year, despite the fact that only half of CIOs are expected to meet their AI-related ROI targets by the end of next year. The analyst's survey revealed that 45% of AI decision-makers need to see a positive ROI within a year for their investments to be considered successful, but only 22% have reported positive impact on EBITDA over the past year.
This disconnect between investment and organizational change could delay the realization of heightened ROI targets.
In an effort to prove AI's value while controlling costs, infrastructure, and risk, tech teams will increasingly turn to open-weight Generative AI (GenAI) models, which can provide performance similar to leading proprietary systems at a fraction of the cost. Forrester predicts that open-weight models will account for half of AI tokens but only five percent of enterprise spend.
Frontier models, such as Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol, and Google's Gemini 4 Argon, will be reserved for critical tasks where errors carry high stakes, though they will be used sparingly.
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