80% of Leaders Expect Budget Growth in 2027 — Forrester Says Spending It Wrong Is the Real Risk

More than 80% of business and technology leaders expect their budgets to increase over the next 12 months, according to Forrester’s 2027 Budget Planning Guides, drawn from a survey of over 2,600 decision-makers globally — 82% of technology leaders and 91% of marketers expect increases, and 55% of customer experience leaders anticipate growth of 5% or more, up from 39% the year prior. After a year of caution, the money is coming back into play.

Where it’s supposed to go is the part sellers should be reading closely. Forrester’s guides recommend increasing spend on building enterprise context that AI agents can act on and on brand visibility specifically within AI answer engines, while cutting spend on tech debt that slows AI gains and on pilots scaling without organizational readiness. Chief Research Officer Sharyn Leaver’s framing, previewed a few days earlier in a companion Forrester post, is blunt: organizations that outperform in 2027 won’t be the ones spending most on AI, but the ones investing in trusted data, strong governance, and organizational readiness. That earlier post also flags something specific enough to act on — platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and review sites often matter more to AI answer engines than a company’s own website, meaning brand-visibility budget increasingly needs to target third-party surfaces, not owned ones.

For B2B sellers walking into 2027 planning conversations, this reframes the pitch. Budget optimism is real and broad-based, but Forrester’s own guidance tells buyers to actively defund “dysfunctional” AI activity — output without value — in favor of governance and readiness spend. A deal pitched purely on capability (“here’s what our AI does”) is competing against a buyer who’s been told explicitly to prioritize the boring infrastructure underneath capability: governed data, clear ownership, measurable outcomes. The sellers who win 2027 budget conversations are the ones who show up with that vocabulary already built into the pitch, not the ones hoping the optimism alone carries the deal.