According to Forrester research reported by The Register, AI is set to account for 20 percent of all business technology spending in 2027. The analyst firm's Technology & Security Predictions point to continued budget growth even as many technology leaders struggle to demonstrate value from their AI investments. Forrester's State of AI Survey 2026 found that 45 percent of AI decision-makers require positive ROI within a year to deem their investments successful, yet more than half of CIOs are likely to miss their related ROI targets.
Forrester expects measurable wins to remain confined to isolated use cases rather than organisation-wide programmes. Only 22 percent of AI decision-makers reported a positive impact on EBITDA over the past 12 months. The firm attributes the gap to a mismatch between investment in technology adoption and the necessary changes to organisational structures, processes, and ways of working. Sharyn Leaver, Forrester's chief research officer, said the spending increase will intensify pressure on leaders to prove AI's value while managing costs, infrastructure, and risk.
One response, Forrester predicts, will be a shift toward open-weight generative AI models. Models such as Gemma, Llama, and Qwen are described as "good enough" for high-volume enterprise workloads like document processing, customer support conversations, internal knowledge search, and routine steps inside agentic workflows. Forrester expects open-weight models to represent half of AI tokens but only five percent of enterprise spend, while frontier models are reserved for critical automations where errors are expensive. The Register notes this is a single-source forecast, and no differing estimates are presented in the report.