Every conversation we have with an IT procurement team this month circles back to the same underlying tension. Budgets are growing, but not evenly, and not for the reasons most teams planned around a year ago. Gartner’s July 2026 forecast revision puts global IT spending at 6.37 trillion dollars for the year, up 14.2 percent, a rate well above the historical four to six percent baseline organisations have budgeted against for most of the past decade.
The Gap Between Headline Growth and What Teams Actually Feel
That headline growth figure is genuine, but it is unevenly distributed in a way that matters enormously for how an individual procurement team experiences this year. Data centre systems spend is up 62.5 percent, driven almost entirely by hyperscaler AI infrastructure that most enterprise procurement teams have no direct involvement in. Software spend, the category most procurement and licensing teams actually manage day to day, is growing a comparatively modest but still significant 15.5 percent, driven by GenAI model development costs and AI-embedded SaaS pricing additions from vendors including Microsoft and Salesforce.
What Is Actually Driving the Software Line Specifically
Digging one level deeper into that software growth figure reveals a pattern worth naming directly for anyone managing licensing relationships day to day. A meaningful share of the increase is not new tools being adopted for the first time. It is existing, already-budgeted tools adding AI capability as a new line item on top of pricing that was previously stable, sometimes running twenty to sixty dollars per user per month once fully deployed. That distinction matters because it means a flat renewal quote from a vendor an organisation has used for years can no longer be assumed to reflect flat underlying cost, since the AI layer riding on top of that familiar product is where most of the actual increase is now concentrated.
The Efficiency Gap Nobody Is Closing With Headcount
The conversation we hear most consistently is not really about budget size at all. It is about being asked to do meaningfully more with a team that is not growing to match. The Hackett Group’s 2026 Procurement Agenda projects workloads rising 8.0 percent this year while staffing headcount actually declines 0.9 percent and budgets contract 0.4 percent, creating a productivity gap of 8.9 percent and an efficiency gap of 8.4 percent that cannot be closed through process optimisation alone.
That gap is precisely why so many procurement conversations this month have shifted from asking for more headcount toward asking what technology can close the gap instead. It is also why the answer to that question is rarely as simple as buying an AI procurement tool and expecting the gap to close on its own.
The AI Readiness Problem Hiding Behind AI Enthusiasm
Almost every procurement leader we speak with this month is under some form of pressure to demonstrate AI adoption, and almost every one of them is candid, once the conversation moves past the initial pitch, about how far their actual data and process maturity sits from genuinely supporting that adoption. The teams under the most cost pressure specifically are, somewhat counterintuitively, the ones showing the weakest AI readiness, precisely because cost-focused teams have historically under-invested in the clean, structured data foundation that AI tooling actually requires to deliver value.
This mismatch matters because it shapes what a realistic AI investment conversation should look like this quarter. A procurement team without a clean, centralised view of its own contract and spend data is not ready to deploy AI-assisted negotiation or benchmarking tools effectively, no matter how compelling the vendor demo looks, and spending scarce budget on the tool before addressing the underlying data gap tends to produce disappointing results that then get blamed on the tool rather than the sequencing.
CPOs Getting a Bigger Seat at the Table, With Bigger Expectations Attached
The organisational shift we are hearing about most consistently this month is a genuine change in where procurement sits relative to the rest of the business. Industry survey data finds forty six percent of companies now say their CPO has a bigger say in high-level decisions than they did previously, with boards and executives increasingly asking procurement to shape platform strategy, define data governance standards, and link sourcing decisions directly to broader product and market outcomes.
That elevated seat comes with elevated expectations attached, and it is changing what procurement leaders tell us they need from a vendor management or software asset management partner. The conversation is shifting from please help us track our licences accurately toward please help us build a defensible, board-ready narrative about why our technology spend is structured the way it is, which is a meaningfully higher bar than pure cost tracking used to require.
The Ownership Fragmentation Problem
A specific and recurring frustration this month has been how fragmented software purchasing authority has become across most organisations, which directly undermines the disciplined, centralised sourcing that both the productivity gap and the AI readiness gap require to close properly. When purchasing decisions sit scattered across dozens of individual budget holders rather than a coordinated procurement function, even a well-resourced central team struggles to build the kind of clean, comprehensive spend visibility that both AI tooling and effective vendor negotiation genuinely depend on.
Rebuilding that centralised visibility does not necessarily mean recentralising every purchasing decision, which is rarely practical or welcomed by the business units who value the autonomy. It does mean building a mandatory, lightweight registration step for any new software purchase above a modest threshold, so procurement retains visibility into what exists across the estate even when it is not the team making every individual buying decision.
The teams that have made real progress on this specific problem this year describe it less as a policy change and more as a cultural one, requiring visible, repeated executive sponsorship before business units genuinely change purchasing habits they have relied on for years. A policy without that sponsorship tends to be quietly ignored the first time a department head decides a purchase is urgent enough to bypass the registration step.
What This Means for the Next Two Quarters
The pattern emerging across these conversations points toward a specific set of priorities worth naming directly for any procurement team planning the rest of this fiscal year. IT procurement is increasingly expected to function as a strategic control plane rather than a predictable, checklist-driven annual cycle, actively shaping AI adoption, financial discipline, and risk management rather than simply processing purchase orders after the fact.
That shift toward strategic control has a direct, practical corollary worth taking seriously given how widespread purchase dissatisfaction remains even as spend accelerates. Recent buyer research continues to find persistently high software purchase regret even as organisations plan to keep increasing spend, with rising technology budgets in 2026 running alongside a share of CIOs expecting increases up meaningfully from the year before, and artificial intelligence named consistently among the categories driving that growth. Growing budgets without a corresponding improvement in purchase discipline is exactly the combination that produces more spend and more regret simultaneously, rather than either one improving on its own.
The Practical Takeaway for This Quarter
For any procurement or IT leadership team weighing where to focus limited attention over the next two quarters, the pattern in these conversations points toward three priorities worth naming explicitly rather than treating as background context. Building genuine spend visibility before investing in AI-assisted procurement tooling, since the tooling only delivers value once the underlying data is clean enough to support it. Preparing procurement to operate with considerably more strategic scrutiny from the board than it has historically received, given how directly CPO influence is growing. And closing the ownership fragmentation gap enough to maintain real visibility into software purchasing, even where full centralisation of the buying decision itself is neither practical nor desirable.
None of these three priorities requires a large new budget line to begin addressing this quarter. Each one is more accurately described as a discipline to build than a tool to buy, which is genuinely good news for procurement teams already operating under the exact budget and headcount pressure described throughout these conversations.
Where 2Data Comes In
This is exactly the kind of work our team at 2Data supports procurement and IT leadership through directly. Building the clean, vendor-neutral spend visibility that AI-assisted procurement tooling actually depends on, closing the ownership fragmentation gap across SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, and AWS estates, and giving procurement the board-ready data it increasingly needs to justify how technology spend is structured are all things we help clients put in place as a standing discipline, not a one-off project.
Whether the immediate priority is preparing for a specific renewal, building a centralised view of software purchasing across a fragmented estate, or simply understanding where AI-related spend is genuinely adding value versus quietly accumulating as an unreviewed cost, that is the gap 2Data exists to close.
Conclusion
The conversations we are having with IT procurement teams this September share a common thread: budgets are growing, expectations are growing faster, and the gap between the two is where most of the current pressure actually sits. Closing that gap is less about finding more budget or more headcount and more about building the underlying data discipline and cross-functional visibility that lets existing resources work considerably harder than they currently can.
The teams entering the final quarter of the year in the strongest position are consistently the ones treating this as a data and governance problem to solve deliberately, rather than a resourcing problem to wait out until the next budget cycle brings relief.
