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Cloud & AI: A Winning Combo


Cloud infrastructure remains the 💳 top spending priority for enterprises, with AI quickly climbing the ranks and challenging traditional enterprise applications.

Let’s dive into the latest insights.



This data from Battery Ventures Cloud Software Spending Survey Q1 2024 that included 100 enterprise CXOs representing nearly $36 billion in annual technology spend, tells a compelling story.



💰 Resilient and Growing Technology Spending


55% of enterprises plan to increase their technology budgets, with 8% planning a major >10% boost, which is twice as many as in Q3 2023.


Budget cuts are less of a concern, with only 22% planning to reduce their budgets, a 7% drop from Q3. For the 22% of CXOs planning to optimize their budgets, top priorities include vendor consolidation, optimizing SaaS licensing, reducing workforce, and migrating to the cloud.



🔀 AI Shifting Priorities


While more than half of enterprises plan to increase overall tech budgets, 79% of respondents (even larger proportion) are planning to increase their AI/ML budgets over the next 12 months.


Generative AI and LLMs have skyrocketed to the 2️⃣ priority for enterprise tech buyers, with enterprises now also refocusing on building the right data tooling to enable AI-powered applications.


To leverage AI, 90% of enterprises either use

✔️ Out-of-box solutions, e.g., GPT-4 API - 50%

✔️ Fine-tune a foundation model - 📍 40% (up from 30% just a quarter ago)



🔝 Enterprise Applications Still on Top, but AI Opens More Questions


Despite the momentum in AI and LLMs, the lion’s share of the budget is still allocated to existing priorities, with enterprise applications and cloud being on top with 📍 30% of combined spend.


While the budget spent on AI is much smaller compared to enterprise applications (below 10%), AI creates an opening for companies with an AI-native approach. Nearly half of enterprises (45%) are now interested in exploring new vendors for AI copilot capabilities.





⚡ Cloud Infrastructure’s Dominance


The AI platform shift in the tech market has reinforced the importance of cloud infrastructure spending for enterprises, significantly benefiting hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.


Their strategic positioning on the infrastructure layer, holding and helping to consolidate customer data (essential for AI), and enabling access to AI models, will help companies to unlock more AI use cases.


Hyperscaler partner ecosystems and cloud marketplaces, where enterprises can modernize and consolidate their enterprise application spend, also present a bullish case for them.


Are you leveraging cloud marketplaces for your own growth to their full potential?


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