Tech productivity: Less promise, more performance

Anyone listening closely to businesses hears mounting frustration as the gap between technology’s promises—greater productivity and higher performance—runs into the reality of mounting spend. This scenario often plays out when companies maintain both cloud and on-premises environments. This frustration isn’t particularly new. What is new, however, is that in 2025, tech leaders finally have the technologies and tools to allow them to answer that most fundamental and bedeviling question: What am I getting for all the money I spend on IT?

The technologies—cloud, SaaS, and gen AI products—are familiar to most people. But their impact is much more than the accounting shift from capital expenditures to operational expenditures. It’s about the ability to track and allocate spend at granular levels and provide new levels of transparency and accountability.

The key priority for CIOs and CTOs to consider in 2025 is how to apply these spend insights to behavior. That begins with using better spend transparency not just to manage IT costs but to encourage the business side of the house to be more accountable for tech spend. As business unit leaders, department heads, and product owners gain insight into what their teams are actually spending to use a SaaS product, make calls on gen AI tools, or access services on the cloud, they can make better-informed decisions about which applications to use and how to use them better.

This shift will require tech leaders to invest in better tracking and managing capabilities and in tools that businesspeople themselves can use. We’re seeing companies in the United Arab Emirates, in particular, investing in financial operations (FinOps) so they can track cloud spend more effectively. Tech leaders will need to train business and product teams to use these tools not just to report but to take action. Poor prompt formulations when working with gen AI tools, for example, can become expensive, which should lead business leaders—with IT’s help—to prod their teams to understand how to use the tools better. Over time, this is likely to lead to even more profound shifts in IT’s role and how it generates value for the business.