# AI could claim a fifth of business tech spending in 2027

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/ai-will-eat-a-fifth-of-tech-budgets-in-2027-but-dont-expect-it-to-pay-for-itself/
- Published: 2026-10-21T17:30:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-10-21T17:37:59+00:00
- Original publisher: The Register
- Original article: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/21/ai-will-eat-a-fifth-of-tech-budgets-in-2027-but-dont-expect-it-to-pay-for-itself/5304466
- Topics: AI, Technology

## Key points

- AI is forecast to take 20 per cent of business technology budgets in 2027.
- Only 22 per cent reported a positive AI impact on EBITDA.
- Open-weight models may account for half of tokens but 5 per cent of spend.

## Summary

Forrester predicts that AI will take up a fifth of business technology spending in 2027, even as many chief information officers struggle to meet their return-on-investment targets. The gap matters because spending is rising faster than organisations are changing their processes and structures to turn AI adoption into measurable, firm-wide gains.

In Forrester’s 2026 survey, 45 per cent of AI decision-makers said they need a positive return within a year for an investment to count as successful, but just 22 per cent reported a positive effect on EBITDA over the previous 12 months. Forrester expects open-weight models to handle half of enterprise AI tokens while accounting for only 5 per cent of spending, particularly on routine, high-volume work; more costly frontier models are likely to be kept for tasks where errors carry greater costs.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.