Global Technology & Communications: Citi CIO Survey: IT Budgets Improve As AI Moves Higher In Priority

Research evidence excerpt

Global Technology & Communications: Citi CIO Survey: IT Budgets Improve As AI Moves Higher In Priority

Global Technology & Communications

09 July 2026 Citi Research

Sector-Specific Impacts

n Application + Data/Analytics Software (Radke) – We continue to see mixed and

bifurcated enterprise software read-throughs following our CIO survey as AI

spending is increasingly cannibalizing other parts of the portfolio. Data

analytics/AI remains the top priority, while digital transformation stayed at (#3)

and consumer-facing apps moving up 2 spots to #4.

For hyperscaler and cloud consumption peers, survey results were relatively

positive with 38% of CIOs seeing consumption spending growth YoY uptick

slightly (vs. 31% in the March survey) and 52% seeing consistent spending vs.

last year (from 50% in the March Survey). LTM public cloud infrastructure

spending expectations downticked to ~6% and NTM public cloud downticked to

7% (vs. 8% for NTM/LTM in our last survey). It is unsurprising to see Data

Analytics/GenAI at the top spot again as recent data points from multiple

conferences intra Q, Snowflake Summit, Databricks events, AWS Summits and

Cannes all reinforced the strategic imperative of a modern data architecture

platform on the path to productionalizing Agentic and AI PoCs. While we

continued to see an increasing demand for Agentic AI among enterprises, we did

witness a much greater % of respondents indicating AI funding is negatively

impacting the overall IT Budget, which signal increasing cannibalization. Overall,

we continue to see the most positive read-throughs to hyperscalers such as

(MSFT and CRWV,) and AI platform/consumption names (MDB, SNOW, PLTR),

which can benefit from increased enterprise AI workloads that could start to