CIOs and CTOs gearing up for 2026 budgeting season find they’re having to adapt to the times. On a macro level, geopolitical unrest is making them cautious in their approach to 2026 budgeting, while rapid AI advances are affecting the tech stack and human capital.
“The amount of change we’re seeing is unprecedented and happening in so many areas. We’ve got all kinds of research that shows the pace [of change] is increasing,” says Bill Briggs, CTO at global professional services network Deloitte, who adds that continued advances in AI’s capability that feel like they happen week to week, certainly quarter to quarter, and year to year.
“There are ways we can invest in architecture and team relationship building to give us more optionality over time, [so we are] able to adapt as [AI] advances and players potentially drop out,” Briggs says.
Meanwhile, the real-world effect of extreme volatility is causing CIOs to diversify their vendor base, as opposed to relying on a single vendor. Their caution extends to any given architecture.
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Bill Briggs, Deloitte
“[CIOs] know change is coming, which nets out to investing in engineering that gives you fungibility, portability, and the ability to swap out big change over time,” Briggs says. now tends to be immediate in target areas.
Where CIOs Should Invest
So much competitive advantage is going to whether or not you have full-stack engineering capability with cyber and cloud AI embedded. “Have you invested in tooling and platforms, so your teams don’t have to do everything from environments and pre-configured cloud hosting to the tool chain for your full CI/CD?” Briggs asks.
“It’s basically investing in the platforms and products codifying our IP, industry or functional knowledge to help our clients get outcomes faster,” he continues. “It’s investing in our people to build AI and software capabilities. We’ve been doing it for a long time, but we had a marked increase in investment in the last two or three years, and that’s continuing [in 2026].”
CIO shops are becoming outcome-based, which makes them accountable for what they’re delivering against the value potential, not how many hours were burned.
“The biggest challenge seems to be changing every day, but I think it’s going to be all about balancing long-term vision with near-term execution,” says Sudeep George, CTO at software-delivered AI data company iMerit.
“Frankly, nobody has a very good idea of what’s going to happen in 2026, so everyone’s placing bets,” he continues. “This unpredictability is going to be the nature of the beast, and we have to be ready for that.”
Speed, trust, and depth of expertise are critical as time-to-value expectations continue to increase. The idea is to have a budget that has contingencies built in so IT can be nimble.
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Sudeep George, iMerit
A lot of companies are coming up with solutions, but not many of them are production grade, so figuring out that dynamic is important,” George says. “I’m pretty sure most CIOs and CTOs are going to be looking at a research part, figuring out how they’re going to make some strategic bets while keeping a budget set aside for R&D.”
AI Advancement Is Impacting Budgets
Marcia Calleja-Matsko, CIO at insurance brokerage, financial services, and HR consulting firm OneDigital, says her company’s customers may be experiencing economic constraints, but they have to address the real question of how a CIO should budget for AI.
Calleja-Matsko says she and her peers are mostly challenged with how [to] budget for AI, thinking about the compute, all those charges, and what the usage will be into the next year.”
“It’s thinking about the different AI models we’re using and how we can appropriately forecast that, she said, adding that her biggest challenge as she looks to 2026, 2027, and 2028 is really shifting her mindset in terms of budgeting.”
OneDigital has already started budgeting for 2026, and the budget needs to balance investments with what the company wants to achieve.
“For us, it’s really increasing our employees’ productivity and gaining operational efficiencies,” Calleja-Matsko says. “We’re creating [AI] ‘coworkers’ that cut the amount of time it takes to do research on a client and providing that information within seconds or minutes. That’s really where we’re spending a large portion of our investment as we look into 2026 and 2027.”
Like many CIOs, she’s already working with stakeholders to decide what the organization wants to achieve and backing that up with execution.
OneDigital has an annual prioritization process for vetting all the different requests and projects, then taking a look at the ROI behind it and asking if it’s aligned with the longer-term business strategy.
“Connecting those dots is what’s really helped us say, ‘These are our five initiatives that are going to provide that ROI for us,’ and those business cases get reviewed. We’re starting that as part of this annual prioritization process,” she says.
Though the OneDigital prioritization process itself hasn’t changed, aside from the addition of the business-case review, what the executives think about as part of the process has changed radically.
“AI is really turning things on their heads. We’re still focusing on security, data and analytics investment [and] talent investments,” says Calleja-Matsko. With AI, companies can have tools creating application code so they may not need lower-level software developers anymore, but they would still need senior-level developers.
“One of the things we’re thinking about with AI and that component is what our talent is going to look like in the future and where we invest,” she adds.
For example, OneDigital is looking at how autonomous agents could help make employees more productive so they don’t have to do mundane work. Meanwhile, the company has been growing quickly by acquiring property, casualty and wealth businesses.
Marcia Calleja-Matsko, OneDigital
“It has always been important to really make sure my team and I are engaged with where our business is heading and how we’re enabling business outcomes,” says Calleja-Matsko. “Part of that is how we incorporate AI into the services we’re providing our customers and users. It’s been a very intentional discussion with our stakeholders to make sure we are aligned because we can’t operate in a silo.”
OneDigital is already focused on optimizing costs, given the duplication and tech debt that comes with acquisitions.
“Reducing the amount of tech debt will always continue to be a focus for my organization,” says Calleja-Matsko. “We’re constantly looking at re-evaluating contracts, terms, [and] whether we have overlapping business capabilities that are being addressed by multiple tools that we have.
It’s rationalizing, she adds, and what that does is free up investment. How is this vendor pricing its offering? How do we make sure we include enough in our budget based on that pricing model?
“That’s my challenge,” Calleja-Matsko emphasizes.
Talent is top of mind for 2026, both in terms of attracting it and retaining it. Ultimately though, AI investments are enabling the company to spend more time with customers.
“It’s not IT budgeting anymore. It’s how we look at investing in technology. We have to think about budgeting around what are they expecting from a business outcome perspective,” she says.
A Fundamental Issue That’s Derailing Investments
Deloitte’s Briggs recently met with three CEOs in different industries who said they lack a technology vision and roadmap. Not surprisingly, they’re not sure their companies are making the best investments.
“Things that CIOs are doing that get budget to hold in a challenging year like this, or actually get budget to increase, are building confidence in how we can take advantage of the technology that exists today, and we’re building it in a way that’s going to evolve as a technology advances tomorrow,” says Briggs.
The organizations that don’t have a view of what it means — the “so what” and then the “now what” — are stuck with wheels spinning in uncomfortable places, Briggs adds.” I would bet a lot of the CIOs and CTOs in those organizations won’t be there for long, to be honest, because patience is thinning.”
A disproportionate amount of investment is focused on growth versus efficiency and cost, he says, but the big issue is the lack of AI ROI.
“The best CIOs are showing investment portfolio linked directly to growth — new markets, customer creation, customer satisfaction and efficiency gains,” Briggs continues. “Most CIO shops aren’t thought of as being particularly productive and effective.
“For many years, tech investments may have had a business case to write the check [but] rarely is there a value capture, closed-loop exercise to be able to showcase why that was good for the enterprise or the mission of the government. Those days are over.”
