AI Reshapes IT Priorities: Flexera Survey Reveals Shift in 2024
Global, Thursday, 14 November 2024.
Flexera’s 2025 IT Priorities report highlights AI’s growing influence on IT leaders’ strategies. With 42% of leaders seeing significant benefits in AI integration, the technology is poised to redefine organizational priorities and drive innovation across industries.
AI’s Growing Influence on IT Strategies
Flexera’s recently released 2025 IT Priorities report, unveiled on November 14, 2024, underscores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on IT strategies. The report, based on a comprehensive survey involving 800 IT leaders from the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, reveals a keen interest in AI, with 42% of respondents identifying its integration as a significant benefit to their organizations. This growing emphasis on AI highlights a shift in how IT leaders are prioritizing technological advancements to drive innovation and efficiency within their operations.
Challenges and Opportunities in AI Integration
Despite the enthusiasm for AI, the survey indicates several challenges that IT leaders face. Notably, a significant proportion, 31%, believe they are overspending on security tools, while 68% report that business units are purchasing more SaaS and cloud services than they are aware of. These figures suggest a gap in resource management and oversight, underscoring the need for improved processes to maximize the benefits of AI and cloud technologies. Meanwhile, 65% of IT leaders acknowledge that emerging technologies like AI necessitate new management processes, pointing to a readiness to adapt to these technological shifts.
Vendor Landscape and Economic Implications
The vendor landscape is also evolving, with OpenAI making a notable entry by ranking fourth among top tech vendors for the first time, tying with Oracle at 37%. Microsoft leads with a 63% presence, followed by Google at 49% and Amazon Web Services at 38%. This shift in vendor dynamics highlights the competitive environment driven by AI advancements. Furthermore, the report notes that only 13% of IT leaders prioritized FinOps in the last year, despite 71% citing cloud costs as a significant budgetary concern. This highlights a disconnect between cost management priorities and actual practices, suggesting a potential area for strategic improvement as organizations continue to adopt AI technologies.
The Path Forward
As organizations navigate the complexities of AI integration, the Flexera report’s findings emphasize the importance of strategic planning and resource management. With innovation being a top priority for 91% of IT leaders, and 93% believing in the enhanced innovative capacity of their organizations with IT resources, there is a clear mandate to align technology investments with strategic goals. As the influence of AI continues to grow, IT leaders are tasked with balancing the opportunities presented by new technologies with the practicalities of implementation, cost management, and process adaptation.