After a wait-and-see approach in 2024, business and technology leaders are gearing up to spend. A resilient global economy and expected growth in 2025 are spurring optimism despite still-elevated interest rates, tight labor markets, and the uncertain impacts of many of this year’s elections. In our recent global survey of 2,200 business and technology decision-makers, leaders across most functions and industries told us that they anticipate budget increases, albeit modest ones.

Upbeat budget expectations will serve leaders well as they build more substantial and intentional plans to create customer value and deliver business results. But they will also need to be shrewd in their spending decisions, especially as modest increases won’t go far after factoring in inflation. Placing the right bets for where to invest will be critical to securing a competitive edge.

Forrester’s 2025 Budget Planning Guides, published today, provide data-driven insights and advice to help technology, marketing, customer experience, digital, and sales leaders make the right spending decisions for the year ahead. (Clients can access our Budget Planning Guides here; nonclients can read select guides here.) Along with recommendations for where to invest, the guides can help you identify areas to pull back on spending and opportunities to experiment to fuel new growth.

While we encourage you to explore the guides in depth, a few key actions to prioritize in 2025 include the following:

  • Strengthen cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences. Strong alignment leads to better outcomes: Leaders whose marketing, digital, and customer experience (CX) teams are highly aligned report 1.6x faster revenue growth than their peers and 1.4x better customer retention, Forrester data shows. Help ensure functional alignment around customer journeys by investing in a shared journey atlas and prioritizing key journeys — hire an outside partner to assist and train your team if necessary.
  • Invest in capabilities and frameworks for AI governance and trust. Governance is a prerequisite to trust in AI that requires guardrails and policies for data access, usage, sharing, storage, and retention. It also requires investing in security and privacy, including approaches like advanced encryption, data masking, differential privacy, and data clean rooms. To retain the trust of customers and employees as you deploy AI, identify and prioritize the levers of trust that matter most to them in your context.
  • Shed bespoke or isolated tech stacks. Years of teams building and maintaining their own applications or insisting on idiosyncratic “ideal” architectures has resulted in massive technology sprawl and technical debt. This results in unsustainable cost, support, security, and training overhead. It’s time to inventory your bespoke applications and isolated infrastructure that serves just one or a few applications and replace them — even though addressing that sprawl will require some up-front investment.
  • Experiment with AI agents for marketing. AI agents are a broad, emerging category of systems that are trained to act invisibly on behalf of an enterprise or individual. Marketers will benefit from internal-facing AI agents and adapt their marketing strategies to interact with consumer-facing and consumer-owned agents. Early iterations of AI agents that exist today — such as rules-based chatbots, generative AI tools for employee productivity, creative agents, and preference centers — require heavy human interaction. As AI agents evolve to become more autonomous, experiment with marketing use cases and applying AI to improve the customer experience.

Our 2025 Budget Planning Guides explore these recommendations in greater depth and provide additional function-specific insights to inform your planning and budgeting. As you look to optimize your spending in the coming year, use our guides to plan and budget with confidence.