AI will eat a fifth of tech budgets in 2027, but don't expect it to pay for itself

Forrester warns that AI will consume roughly 20% of business technology spend in 2027, yet most CIOs are unlikely to see broad ROI because gains are expected mainly from isolated use cases rather than enterprise-wide transformation. For IT leaders, the strategic takeaway is that value will come from tighter governance, operating-model change, and disciplined model selection—using lower-cost open-weight models for high-volume workloads and reserving frontier models for critical, high-risk tasks. The pressure will be to prove measurable business outcomes while controlling infrastructure, token, and risk costs.