{"id":188489,"date":"2025-12-12T19:57:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T19:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/188489\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T19:57:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T19:57:09","slug":"companies-are-finally-paying-for-ai-and-paying-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/188489\/","title":{"rendered":"Companies Are Finally Paying for AI, and Paying Big"},"content":{"rendered":"

For much of the past year, Wall Street and Silicon Valley have wrestled with the same uncomfortable question: Will companies really spend money on AI<\/a>, or is the hype just outpacing budgets?<\/p>\n

A new CIO survey from RBC Capital suggests that question may finally have an answer, and it’s a resounding yes.<\/p>\n

RBC recently polled 117 IT professionals at companies with annual revenue ranging from below $250 million to more than $25 billion. 90% of the respondents said their organizations plan to spend more on AI in 2026.<\/p>\n

“Overall, we came away increasingly optimistic of macro\/budget stabilization taking shape in 2026 and encouraged by the pace of early GenAI adoption,” the RBC analysts wrote in a research note summarizing the findings.<\/p>\n

CIOs are not only moving rapidly into production with AI systems, but they are also setting aside dedicated budgets to fund that adoption.<\/p>\n

A striking 90% of technology leaders said their organizations are creating new budgets specifically for generative AI and LLM projects, up from 85% the year before. That suggests AI is becoming additive rather than substitutive in enterprise tech spending.<\/p>\n

Even more telling: 60% of respondents said they are already in production with AI initiatives, a jump from 39% the previous year. Another 32% expect to be in production within six months.<\/p>\n

This shift comes after months of skepticism from investors who questioned whether businesses would convert pilot projects into real spending. The survey data suggests that moment is now arriving.<\/p>\n

CIOs overwhelmingly cited AI as the top category for increased software spending next year, surpassing cybersecurity and IT service management. And in open-ended responses, executives repeatedly named AI as their biggest area of investment for 2026, often paired with infrastructure upgrades and automation initiatives, according to the RBC survey.<\/p>\n

Use cases are expanding beyond experimentation. Seventy-six percent of CIOs said their AI strategies now target both cost savings and revenue generation, a shift that reinforces AI’s transition from a novelty to a competitive mandate.<\/p>\n

Concerns remain \u2014 data privacy tops the list \u2014 but those worries are no longer slowing adoption. Instead, AI is becoming the primary force expanding IT budgets heading into 2026.<\/p>\n

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here<\/a>. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For much of the past year, Wall Street and Silicon Valley have wrestled with the same uncomfortable question:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-188489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}