The Flexera 2025 IT Priorities Report - Our Analysis

ITAM News & Analysis

The Flexera 2025 IT Priorities Report - Our Analysis

This article is by Kelly Yip; ITAM Thought Leader and Advisor; ITAM Forum

On the 14th November 2025, Flexera unveiled its annual survey findings through the highly anticipated 2025 IT Priorities Report. This detailed report, based on the insights of 800 IT leaders across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia, explores the evolving mindset and priorities of today’s IT leaders. The report uncovers critical themes from the rising influence of AI to the relentless pursuit of cost efficiency.

Report Highlights

The key takeaways from the report include:

• AI challenges: 74% of respondents anticipate increased AI usage within the next 2-3 years. However, 90% believe employee skill sets need to evolve to best leverage generative AI integration. The number one challenge faced by organisations – integrating AI.
• Technology spend: The ongoing trend of attempting to crack down on overspend will continue into 2025. IT leaders highlighted significant overspend on security tools, SAAS, and IAAS/PAAS.
• Google & OpenAI closing the gap: While Microsoft remains the top technology vendor for the fourth year in a row, Google and OpenAI are closing this gap. Google made the number two spot with Open AI tying with Oracle for number three.
• Decision makers not FinOps focused: Despite rising concern around cloud spend, 87% of IT decision makers have not made Cloud costs or FinOps practices a priority. Cloud costs are expected to increase as AI integration increases cloud usage.
• Innovation hindered by problems: Despite 93% of IT leaders claiming their organisation has become more innovative, many believe this innovation isn’t happening in the right areas. 42% believe the time spent reacting to problems hinders their ability to influence innovation.

ROI for Artificial Intelligence

AI remains a primary focus , with “Integrating AI” achieving 16 percentage points more than the next closest priority. This reflects an 11-point jump from 2024 and demonstrates an increasing shift in focus towards AI prioritisation. What may have initially appeared as a trend, looks now, like it’s here to stay.

Return on AI investment remains a challenge. Many organisations are still in the pilot stage and are yet to demonstrate tangible value from AI. This then raises the question of what ‘tangible value’ looks like and which benchmarks to use. However, with 90% of IT leaders believing the skill sets of their employees need to evolve to best leverage AI, addressing this concern is key to driving AI value. Fundamentally, for organisations to maintain AI investments, they quickly need to adapt and find ways to demonstrate ROI.

Cost Savings/Overspend

This key priority will continue into 2025. Last year, 20% of IT leaders believed their spending was fine. This year, that percentage decreased to just 15%, indicating increased concerns. One possible reason is organisations wanting to reinvest savings into AI initiatives. This means the focus around cost savings will likely remain until AI investment spending plateaus.

Based on the results of the question below, both cloud infrastructure technology and physical hardware are of great concern. Perhaps this indicates that organisations struggle to make the best decisions in relation to cloud. However, the primary concern relates to security tools, with 31% of respondents believing they overspend in this area.

Security Risks

It’s no surprise that reducing security risks is a top priority. Expensive data breaches have pushed organisations to bolster their defences particularly around cloud security. As a result, security spending continues to rise while organisations try to find the right balance between spending and saving.

Summary

Overall, the results of Flexera’s 2025 IT Priorities Report reflect a continuation of key trends with a sharp increase in the focus around AI. This is further reflected in the vendor results, with OpenAI rising to prominence within organisations, particularly in the UK.

Throughout 2025, organisations will need to carefully balance innovation with cost reduction whilst ensuring measurable ROI for AI. As cost reduction remains a key priority, organisations must ensure measured and accounted for value from all applications, especially AI.  

In addition, the report highlights the need for IT leaders to address skill gaps within their teams. To fully leverage AI and other emerging technologies, organisations must invest in up-skilling their workforce. This will ensure they can successfully navigate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

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