“As AI becomes integral to business strategy, CIOs are being forced to reconsider how and where it’s optimal to deploy compute resources. The need for low latency, cost efficiency, and compliance in AI applications is driving a rapid shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. For IT leaders, this means 2025 will be a pivotal year for a comprehensive realignment of their infrastructure with the realities of the AI era.”
Enterprise IT in 2025 is entering a period of profound reinvention as CIOs push AI beyond isolated functions, wrestle with the immature foundations of agentic AI, and escalate efforts to counter suddenly looming post-quantum threats. Futurum’s Q2 2025 CIO Insights survey reveals 89% of IT leaders driving AI for strategic transformation, 80% elevating quantum-resilient security to board-level priority, and 71% rethinking optimal cloud environments under intensifying AI workload pressures.
Three primary reasons are driving this change.
Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.
It’s good to see Salesforce successfully navigate the current “SaaSpocalypse” wave.
They heralded the “no-software” era, and now are poised to enter the next era, however it ends up being ...defined.
.@Salesforce stock has recovered from the #SaaSocalypse damage by going up 42.88% in last one month. Major bump came Thursday this week after their earnings and a joint-announcement with Anthropic on Wednesday this week launching joint #Claudeforce (details below).
Stock is
My new essay on the great AI productivity divide and why the winners are already be pulling away. https://x.com/i/article/2093706345874608128
Critical insight: AI will rug-pull marginal businesses by altering their key operating parameters faster than many C-suites can react.
The danger isn’t just “AI disruption.” It’s discovering... that one assumption your business depends upon has suddenly been moved by AI economics:
a surprise I think is coming
the quick payback periods and extraordinarily high IRR for AI infrastructure, even at monumental scale, will push up cost of capital sufficient to push many traditional businesses into the abyss, even those without obvious direct AI counter-exposure
It’s become quite clear that AI is going to become the central operating construct for much of science, medicine, and industry.
It’s just a matter of when. The long pole: It will take humans ...time to adapt.
Today, we're kicking off the first phase of the research preview for Model Hardware Standard (MHS): a new standard for AI agents to safely operate physical equipment in scientific research and advanced manufacturing.
Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview
A4.1) It will be a whole new world if those assumptions hold up. If they do, the Big #AI picture may change even more than the corporate #IT picture. The OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world can't ...afford (literally) for our costs to approach zero. #ciochat
@dhinchcliffe #CIOChat A3. Evidence of Business urgency trumps all. (pun not intended) Time is the deciding factor; execution gaps emerge quickly driving margins down, removing opportunities, and ...ultimately shareholder value
@waynesadin And by decisions, I really mean “plans.” Remember those? 😉 #CIOChat
@dhinchcliffe A4: The durable core is to serve the business, the execution plan for the #CIO changes drastically with #AI capabilities incorporated. The economics of change and #Innovation that IT ...can enable the business with are more than ever game changer. #CIOChat
#CIOChat Great chat today! Join us at 2pm ET next Thursday. Topic: The Vendor Meeting
Hope you enjoy our movie tie-ins to intro next week’s topic.
Please suggest topics and invite your IT ...colleagues. Every Thursday at 2pm ET.
@waynesadin Yes, I now describe IT strategy as “making the best possible and most flexible/reversible decisions at the last responsible moment.”
#CIOChat
A4. Strategy is becoming more and more "drive change ever faster": AI makes 'solution construction' cheaper, but problems get harder, and #OCM is still the big bottleneck. My strategic shift is ...investing in "AI Adjacent" tasks like OCM to move faster when software releases get
@dhinchcliffe #CIOChat A2: a) A real strategy needs to decide how the organization will operate, b) how IT becomes a business unit with a profit agenda as it morphs to a GBU, and c) how it will drive... value across the org's ecosystem of trading partners as A2A matures.
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Whether you are defining business, channel, or go-to-market strategy; evaluating vendors or justifying ROI; or commissioning research to fill an emerging market need, we have your back, with a program that answers your questions with the objectivity and credibility to drive real decisions.
To do it, we bring unmatched data to bear: Futurum research, surveys, and market projections; validated market feeds; ETR’s 15 years of insight from 10,000 technology decision-makers; G2’s buyer and user data; and what our analysts hear every day. Add leading primary collection, from AI-moderated voice interviews to surveys and analyst-led interviews, all turnkey, and every project comes out credible, nuanced, and actionable.
And we don’t just drop the results in your lap. For internal work, we provide analyst-led sessions, interactive dashboards, and a range of formats. For market-facing work, Futurum delivers turnkey activation and amplification that actually gets seen, by people and by LLMs, through our media and share of voice. This is research that moves decisions and markets.
We will meet you wherever you are, from a fast-turn brief to a multi-year program, and shape the work to your goals, timeline, and budget. The right program for your moment.
If any of this is useful, I would love to talk.
VP, Custom Research · The Futurum Group
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