IT Budget Growth Hits the Brakes! Morgan Stanley July 2025 CIO Survey: Enterprise Tech Spending at Inflection Point

Morgan Stanley's survey of 100 North American and European CIOs reveals 2025 IT budget growth expectations adjusted to 3.6%, down from 4.1% earlier this year. Key findings: AI/ML maintains top CIO priority despite ongoing ROI validation challenges, with 39% of CIOs allocating new budgets for GenAI; security spending expected to surge 9.8% as the most defensive IT category; cloud workloads to grow from 44% to 68% by 2027; Microsoft leads in AI and cloud services adoption. While short-term budget revision trends skew negative (0.7X ratio), long-term digital transformation confidence remains robust (3.4X ratio).