What are your IT peers investing in?
We spoke to about 1,300 IT leaders from various organizations to understand what they're evaluating.
The data presented is consensual and comes directly from our conversations.
Most of it is the kind of thing you'd only hear from a peer you know well enough to ask, so we've put it in one place.
What your peers are prioritizing
Top ten categories, by number of organizations evaluating each one:
A couple of things worth pulling out:
- AI and security categories together make up a little over half of all the evaluations in the data.
- Storage, backup, endpoints and networking add up to around 485 evaluations between them, which is a fair chunk of the list.
- That's the quiet half of the list that a lot of IT leaders haven't been able to pay much attention to, and going by these numbers, a good number of their peers have been getting on with it anyway.
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What your peers are moving towards
We compared the first half of the period with the second, and two shifts came through fairly clearly.
AI evaluations got more specific
Number of evaluations, first half of the period against the second.
- General AI/ML: 215 evaluations in the first half, and none in the second. Those evaluations went into named use cases instead, which is why the general category empties out.
- AI agents for IT help desk: 9 to 69. The biggest of the named use cases.
- Conversational and agentic AI: 7 to 49.
- AI agents for HR self-service: 5 to 30.
- AI agents for procurement: 10 to 22.
- AI security as its own line: 1 to 19.
What we'd take from that:
- Peers who are buying tend to have a specific job in mind rather than a general AI plan.
- Help desk is the most common place people start, and it's also the one where the saving is easiest to put a number against.
- AI infrastructure carries a median budget of $200K against $100K for most other categories, so a fair few organizations are spending on the compute side as well as the software.
Security evaluations moved down a layer
Change in evaluations between the two windows. Grew to the right, shrank to the left.
What we'd take from that:
- The categories that grew are all things that run day to day, and the ones that shrank are mostly things you set up once, so it looks like a lot of organizations have moved from choosing an architecture to operating it.
- Identity is the fastest-growing security category in the data by some distance.
- Detection and response is showing up mostly as a managed service, so it's being bought rather than staffed in a lot of cases.
- Compliance comes up as the reason behind security spend in more than 100 of these conversations.
One caveat on the comparison: the second window covers nine months and the first covers six, so the direction of each move is more reliable than the size of it.
