Three Decisions, No Playbook: IT Sourcing, AI Costs, Budgets
IDC ·
Only 3.1% of organizations worldwide have reached the most mature stage of AI adoption. Sixty-one percent are still stuck in the two least mature stages, with the broad middle barely moving in a year. Most technology leaders can’t say with confidence which group they’re in. That uncertainty is landing at the worst possible moment. Seventy-three […] The post Three Decisions, No Playbook: IT Sourcing, AI Costs, Budgets appeared first on IDC .
Only 3.1% of organizations worldwide have reached the most mature stage of AI adoption. Sixty-one percent are still stuck in the two least mature stages , with the broad middle barely moving in a year. Most technology leaders can’t say with confidence which group they’re in.
That uncertainty is landing at the worst possible moment.
Seventy-three percent of organizations worldwide now say excessive AI spending on applications and models, plus the platforms underneath them, is a major risk to their technology investment plans over the next year , rising to 77% in healthcare and financial services.
AI funding is also moving into bigger tiers: more spend is shifting into the $5M–$50M+ range for 2026 and 2027, even as nearly 70% of C-suite IT leaders expect their overall IT budgets to grow .
Right now, technology leaders are making three decisions at once, with no established playbook for any of them.
None of these are once-a-year exercises. They come up in board meetings and budget reviews, frequently colliding with a renewal deadline nobody flagged in advance, and a technology leader without an outside reference point is making each one on internal conviction alone.
These three are just what’s most urgent right now. Whatever the decision, the same grounding applies: independently verified market intelligence, benchmarked against real peer data, available exactly where the decision is happening.
IDC Quanta gives IT leadership, security and operations, and finance and procurement that same grounding, including but not limited to the three decisions above.
IDC Quanta backs each of those decisions with specifics beyond general research access:
The gap between the 3.1% of organizations that have actually reached AI maturity and the ones that only believe they have is exactly the kind of thing a board finds out about the hard way, usually during a budget review, not before one. IDC Quanta gives a technology leader the evidence to walk into that conversation already prepared.
The post Three Decisions, No Playbook: IT Sourcing, AI Costs, Budgets appeared first on IDC .