AI could claim a fifth of business tech spending in 2027

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.