Featuring:
Stephanie Balaouras, VP, Group Director, Keith Johnston, VP, Group Director, and Srividya Sridharan, VP, Group Director
Show Notes:
Heading into last year’s budget planning season, business and tech leaders were feeling cautious. Now, the hesitation is over, and they’re gearing up to spend. This week on What It Means, VPs and Group Research Directors Stephanie Balaouras, Keith Johnston, and Srividya Sridharan explain where business and technology leaders should invest, divest, and experiment to see the biggest gains.
The episode starts with a look at 2025 budget expectations. While leaders across most functions expect increases, tech leaders are particularly bullish, with 91% expecting bigger budgets. Across all business functions, increases in tech spending will outpace increases in personnel and other areas as leaders look to gain an advantage with AI and maximize the business value of data. Partnership with IT will be critical in these endeavors, Sridharan notes — savvy leaders will be “smarter about sharing the budget, sharing those resources, finding skills wherever they are in the organization.”
The discussion then turns to where to invest. The common threads across business functions are data and fundamentals. Tech leaders, says Balaouras, should focus on data, governance, security, and privacy, along with strategic infrastructure investments. CX leaders, meanwhile, should prioritize quality over quantity in terms of data and digital touchpoints as they work to reverse historically low CX quality scores, Johnston says.
Next, the conversation turns to places to cut spending and capture savings. Here, one theme is dismantling silos — in B2B marketing, for instance, shifting focus from channel-specific to channel-agnostic strategies to improve efficiency and productivity. Another is reducing disconnected tech tools and platforms, and for tech leaders, reining in cloud sprawl. “You’ve had lines of business being able to buy any SaaS application and subscribe to [any] cloud services that they want,” says Balaouras. While thoughtful cloud investments still make sense, “getting your arms around all of the cloud sprawl will save you a ton of money.”
Sridharan, Johnston, and Balaouras then provide suggestions for low-cost experimentation opportunities that could yield future growth. B2B marketing and sales leaders should take steps toward revenue process transformation to better align with buyers’ processes and deliver better customer experiences, Sridharan says. CX leaders, meanwhile, should keep exploring generative AI (genAI) and other emerging technologies that will enable richer and more natural customer interactions, says Johnston. And for tech leaders, exploring multimodal genAI that encompasses images, audio, video, and code as well as text could ultimately enable more personalized experiences, adds Balaouras.
The episode closes with additional advice for business and tech leaders to get through the budgeting process with money left to spend, so listen for that.
To learn more about how to use our Budget Planning Guides, be sure to check out our 2025 Budget Planning Guides Hub, which includes downloadable versions of the reports and links to upcoming webinars and blogs.
