AI Spend Hits 20% of Tech Budgets Amid ROI Struggles

Artificial intelligence is projected to consume 20% of all business technology spending next year, as The Register first reported, based on predictions from the analyst firm Forrester. However, this surge in capital is not yet translating into broad financial success.

Reporting from The Register notes that Forrester's State Of AI Survey 2026 indicates more than half of CIOs are expected to miss their AI-related ROI targets in the coming year. Currently, only 22% of AI decision-makers report a positive impact on EBITDA over the last 12 months. While some leaders may improve how they link spending to returns, Forrester suggests that success will likely remain confined to isolated use cases rather than comprehensive programs.

Sharyn Leaver, Forrester's chief research officer, stated that this spending trend increases pressure on leaders to demonstrate value while managing risk, infrastructure, and costs. The report suggests that a failure to align technology adoption with organizational change is delaying the realization of ROI targets.

To reduce costs, enterprises are shifting toward open-weight models—such as Llama, Qwen, and Gemma—for high-volume tasks like internal knowledge search, customer support, and document processing. Forrester predicts these models will account for half of all AI tokens but only 5% of enterprise spend. High-cost frontier models, including Google's Gemini 4 Argon, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Opus 5.5, will be reserved for critical tasks where errors are costly.