Bernstein Survey: IT budget growth expectations remain strong, with cybersecurity, generative AI applications, and platform software as the three main investment directions

Glonghui, July 15 – According to Bernstein's mid-year CIO survey results, expectations for IT budget growth in 2026 remain robust, with growth rates similar to those forecast for 2025. There is a clear divergence in spending expectations across regions: the anticipated full-year IT budget growth in the United States has been raised by 60 basis points, while in Europe, the expected growth has been cut by as much as 130 basis points. The firm noted that cybersecurity, generative AI applications, and platform software remain the top three investment priorities for CIOs, with incremental spending mainly concentrated among hyperscale cloud service providers. Microsoft and Amazon AWS are expected to capture the largest share of budget growth, while ServiceNow and Salesforce are the only two software vendors with slightly positive trends in resource allocation. Meanwhile, CIOs do not plan to increase their spending on large language model (LLM) providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, further confirming the trend that enterprises prefer to leverage AI via mature software platforms rather than building the capabilities themselves.