Over 90% Of Technology Leaders Intend To Spend More In 2025, Says Forrester

Leaders across functions, industries and geographies intend to spend more in 2025, after a year of restrained budget expectations. Despite high interest rates, tight labour markets and political uncertainties, 91% of global tech decision-makers and 87% of global marketing leaders are planning for budget increases in the year ahead, according to Forrester's 2025 Budget Planning Guides.

However, pressure to optimise spending and drive efficiencies remains a focus for organisations. As a result, to derive the most value from increased budgets, leaders must invest in cross-functional efforts that can impact their firm's growth, according to the guides.

Forrester's Budget Planning Guides provide data-backed recommendations for technology and security, B2B and B2C marketing, customer experience, digital strategy, and sales and revenue operations leaders. They also include spending intention benchmarks and recommendations for areas to experiment, deepen investments and divest budget allocations.

Areas To Increase Investment In 2025

Cross-Functional Efforts To Deliver Connected Experiences: According to Forrester, organisations with strong alignment among their marketing, digital and CX teams report 1.6 times faster revenue growth than their peers and 1.4 times better customer retention. To ensure this, leaders should invest in customer journeys where functional teams and business units are strongly integrated.

Capabilities And Frameworks For AI Governance And Trust: As AI deployments become ubiquitous, firms should invest in building policies and frameworks around data access, usage, sharing, storage and retention to retain customer and employee trust. This also requires security and privacy investments in approaches like advanced encryption, data masking, differential privacy and data clean rooms.

Areas To Decrease Investment In 2025

Journey-Mapping Without A Purpose: CX leaders often struggle to build momentum and drive action from their mapping efforts. As a result, they should scale back journey-mapping initiatives that lack a clear objective, an executive champion or customer insights.

Bespoke Tech Stacks: Leaders should inventory and replace their bespoke applications and isolated infrastructure that only serves one or a few applications. Addressing this requires up-front investment to reduce technical debt and deliver better IT. 

Areas For Experimentation In 2025

Platform Teams That Break Down Silos And Innovate: Platform teams are cross-functional, product-centric teams that build and maintain tooling, infrastructure and services, enabling other IT and business teams to build, deploy and manage their applications. Platform teams deliver value to stakeholders by improving alignment and eliminating bottlenecks.

Quantum Security: As cybercriminals amass sensitive data vulnerable to quantum attacks, leaders should follow post-quantum cryptographic developments and experiment with PQ security solutions to insulate critical assets and future-proof their organisation against data breaches.

“While leaders should continue to experiment with more advanced AI capabilities in 2025, those shouldn't be the only experiments they pursue. They should prioritise investments that benefit their entire firm and help establish long-term trust with customers and partners,” said Sharyn Leaver, chief research officer at Forrester.