If so,a market research consultancy has the following budgeting and investment tips to help firms “invest back better”

According to Forrester’s 2025 Budget Planning Guides*, leaders intend to spend more in 2025 — after a year of restrained budget expectations.

Despite high interest rates, tight labor markets, and the uncertainty of US Presidential election, Forrester analysts believe that most global tech decision-makers and global marketing decision-makers are planning for budget increases next year (assuming no major catastrophies affect the world anytime between now and its time window of impact).

The firm asserts that the pressure to optimize spending and drive efficiencies remains a focus for organizations after 2024 is past. As a result, to derive the most value from increased budgets, leaders are advised to invest in cross-functional efforts that have an outsized impact on their firms’ growth. 

According to the firm’s Chief Research Officer, Sharyn Leaver: “While leaders should continue to experiment with more advanced AI capabilities in 2025, those shouldn’t be the only experiments they pursue. They should prioritize investments that benefit their entire firm and help establish long-term trust with customers and partners.” With that said, her investment advisories cover three areas:

  1. Areas to increase investments in:

    • Cross-functional efforts to deliver connected experiences: Organizations with a strong alignment among their marketing, digital, and Customer eXperience teams have reported 1.6 times faster revenue growth than their peers, and 1.4 times better customer retention. To ensure alignment, leaders should invest in customer journeys where functional teams and business units have a strong interlock.
    • Capabilities and frameworks for AI governance and trust: As AI deployments become ubiquitous, firms should invest in building policies and frameworks around data access, usage, sharing, storage, and retention to retain customer and employee trust. This also requires security and privacy investments in approaches like advanced encryption, data masking, differential privacy, and data clean rooms.

  2. Areas to decrease investment in:

    • Journey-mapping without a purpose: Customer-experience leaders in the firm’s research have often struggled to build momentum and drive action from their mapping efforts. As a result, they should scale back journey-mapping initiatives that lack a clear objective, an executive champion, or customer insights.
    • Bespoke tech stacks: Leaders should inventory and replace their bespoke applications and isolated infrastructure that serves just one or a few applications. Addressing this sprawl requires up-front investment to reduce technical debt and deliver high-performance IT.

  3. Areas for experimentation in 2025:

    • Platform teams that break down silos and innovate: Platform teams are cross-functional product-centric teams that build and maintain tooling, infrastructure, and services, enabling other IT and business teams to build, deploy, and manage their applications. Platform teams deliver value to stakeholders by improving alignment and eliminating bottlenecks.
    • Quantum security: As cybercriminals amass sensitive data vulnerable to quantum attacks, leaders should follow post-quantum cryptographic developments and experiment with related security solutions to insulate critical assets and future-proof their organizations against quantum-level data breaches.

*Research guides that provide data-backed recommendations for technology and security, B2B and B2C marketing, customer experience (CX), digital strategy, and sales and revenue operations leaders to make sound planning and budgeting decisions. The guides also include spending intention benchmarks and recommendations for areas to experiment, deepen investments, and divest budget allocations.