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Macro Views Survey Findings Summary
ETR Macro Views Survey consistently tracks and updates core trends like budget growth, spending priorities and organizational trends.
The January 2024 Macro Views Survey captured responses from 1766 IT decision makers (ITDMs), with more than a sixth of respondents from Fortune 500 organizations and 60% holding C-suite or Director-level titles. IT spend estimates for 2024 Q1 are slightly tempered vs. three months prior, now sitting at +2.4% y/y growth, while respondents are, on average, more optimistic on 2024 spending than three months ago, with full-year spend anticipated to grow +4.3% vs. 2023. The total 2023 growth ended the year stronger than anticipated, with respondents citing 3.5% growth last year, higher than the expectations for the prior two survey periods.
IT spend estimates for 2024 Q1 are slightly tempered vs. three months prior, now sitting at +2.4% y/y growth. Respondents are, on average, more optimistic about 2024 spending than three months ago, with full-year spend anticipated to grow +4.3% vs. 2023.
Large enterprises anticipate a +3.5% growth in full-year spend, slightly up from previous estimates, with small and midsize organizations also increasingly positive at +6.5% and +5.0%, respectively.
Among respondents anticipating a decline in 2024 Q1 vs. 2023 Q1 IT spend, reducing staffing costs is the most frequently cited method to achieve the decrease in IT spend, and has grown in relative prevalence vs. prior polling windows.
Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence continues to climb in priority, offset by a
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shrinking lead for Information Security and a lower emphasis on Cloud Migrations.
Chatbots / Conversational AI / Generative AI / LLMs has overtaken Scoping Relevant Business Use Cases as the top priority for ML / AI-related subareas for the next 12 months and was also the only area to show growth.
Less than a quarter of respondents say their organization is NOT evaluating generative AI / LLMs, a number that has consistently fallen each survey period. Customer support, text and data summarization, and code generation and documentation are the most common business use cases for which organizations are evaluating generative AI / LLMs.
Nearly 50% of respondents said generative AI investments were newly added to the budget, while 40% said generative AI dollars were reallocated from elsewhere.
Data Warehousing for Analytics remains the top Database / Data Warehousing priority over the next 12 months, while Enterprise Application priorities have remained stable led by Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Microsoft and AWS see weaker spend scores within decreasing budget profiles across most compute sectors; Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk follow suit. Cisco and Atlassian are seeing large disparities in positive vs. negative spend profiles.
