Squeezing the past to bet on the future

"The excitement surrounding AI capabilities and innovation should act as a catalyst for growth, driving top-line expansion. However, in the short term, the best strategy for tech companies remains familiar: streamline operations, rationalize products, optimize investments, and drive automation—in essence, cost reduction. Such internal efficiencies must facilitate new AI investments, meaning that they must be structural in nature, maintain velocity, and drive productivity improvements. All of this often requires significant changes to operating models, team structures, tools, and processes."

"When emerging trends and major changes arise in the tech sector, we often see a time lag in impact and adaptation between EMEA and North America. But this year's survey suggests that these regions are largely aligned on the perceived challenges facing the sector and their approach to confronting them. As the industry matures, it seems disruptions impacting tech businesses are truly global in nature."

"The opportunities and challenges the tech industry faces reside at a deeper level than just profitability versus growth. Although every tech company is thinking about how to better capture demand against competitors, hardware companies are witnessing a rare window of opportunity to toggle the balance of power in a traditionally homogeneous hardware-OS-applications value chain that AI will redefine. As companies shift towards more diverse hardware technology stacks, hardware companies in turn will shift from purely delivering solutions to designing how user-hardware experiences will function with AI. This new landscape profoundly impacts their product architecture and ecosystem strategies. Application and SaaS players, on the other hand, face the existential threat of their service offerings getting displaced by emerging AI players of a fundamentally different 'species' (AI agents)."