Flexera, the global leader in technology spend and risk management for hybrid IT, released its annual survey findings, suggesting that AI is redefining IT leader priorities. Of note, 42 percent of IT leaders said they believe that if they could integrate AI, it would make the most difference to their organizations. When pressed about their “top tech vendors,” OpenAI and Oracle ranked fourth, an indicator of AI’s influence on IT leaders.
The Flexera 2025 IT Priorities report surveyed 800 IT leaders from the U.S., U.K., Germany and Australia to determine how IT decision makers’ priorities have evolved over the past 12 months, in addition to outlining key focuses for next year.
“While IT leaders are facing a myriad of challenges and opportunities, artificial intelligence seems to pose the biggest potential gains in the short- and long-term,” said Conal Gallagher, Flexera’s CIO. “There’s an extraordinary expense required of AI projects, creating an even greater sense of urgency to not only understand the impact of the investment but to quickly demonstrate returns that advance core business objectives. AI is not only disrupting and transforming IT—for example, creating more focus on compute resources and data quality—but planting the seeds to change the way we all work. It’s no surprise that IT is at the forefront of recognizing and ushering in this disruption, helping to be a guiding force for their organizations.”
Additional findings include:
- The estimated average amount of overspending across cloud, software, SaaS and hardware is around 20-25 percent. While 15 percent of IT leaders say they believe their spending is fine, this is a five point decrease from last year, indicating some cost concerns are increasing. For those IT leaders who did report issues, 31 percent said they believed they were overspending on security tools, which is the top answer when compared to other technologies such as cloud infrastructure (28 percent) or hardware (27 percent).
- While many of the top vendors such as Microsoft (63 percent), Google (49 percent), Amazon Web Services (38 percent) and Oracle (37 percent) have a large swath of services which could account for their foothold with IT leaders, the inclusion of OpenAI (37 percent) in the top five further indicates AI’s importance on the modern technology landscape.
- Despite increasing overspend concerns and a shift toward expensive AI investments, just 13 percent of IT leaders reported that FinOps was a priority in the last 12 months. Seventy-one percent reported that cloud costs are a heavy burden on their IT budgets, and 68 percent said their business units are buying more SaaS and cloud than of which they are aware.
Ninety-one percent of IT leaders believe innovation is a top strategic priority for their organization, and 93 percent say their organization is more innovative with their IT and technology resources. While 54 percent say that innovation is not occurring in the right areas, 65 percent also believe that emerging technologies, such as AI, no longer neatly fit into traditional buckets and new teams or processes are needed to manage them.
