60% of Enterprise CIO’s Report Plans to Increase Spending on AI Inferencing Workloads with Microsoft, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence Survey

A new survey from Bloomberg Intelligence (BI) shows that Chief Information Officers (CIOs)’s are shifting their spending from servers, storage, and networking, to Large Language Model (LLM) deployment. The survey shows a clear preference for Microsoft in cloud deployment.

According to the AI survey results, AI investments were a high priority for CIOs, ranking higher in planned spending allocation versus prior surveys. The growing AI emphasis suggests rising importance among CIOs to leverage AI to remain competitive. Investments in AI models, GPUs and cloud all ranked high in laying the foundation for future AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s GPU leadership was on display, with Intel’s CPU preference improving for AI servers.

Now that enterprises have spent significant time in the research and development phase with their AI models, many of them are progressing from the proof-of-concept stage to deployment of their AI copilots. This has led to Microsoft gaining 14 percentage points since the December survey in hyperscale cloud value for data analysis, Google gaining 5 points and Amazon falling 17 points. Spending on AI models and workloads is likely to continue to increase over the next 12 months as more enterprises progress into larger-scale deployments.

Mandeep Singh, Senior Technology Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence and the lead author of the report said: We’re witnessing a significant shift in CIO preferences as enterprise AIs move towards the deployment of their copilots, with 66% of respondents saying they are in the process of deployment compared to December’s 32%. This, coupled with newfound visibility in the need for robust cybersecurity spending in the wake of the CrowdStrike disruption, have significantly shifted the spending needs of CIOs even in the last six months.

Cybersecurity dominated IT spending in July with 40% of CIO respondents, nearly double the amount that responded in December 2023, citing it as their highest priority. The survey was conducted during the same time period as the CrowdStrike outage, when cybersecurity spending became increasingly non-discretionary due to the high risk of business disruption seen by the interruption. Servers, storage, and networking all were also deprioritized for CIOs since the last survey.

The full July 2024 CIO Survey will be available to Bloomberg Terminal subscribers who can access the report via {BI}.

Methodology

BI’s survey of 50 US-based CIOs was administered by Guidepoint from July 9-23, with questions regarding current and planned use of generative AI within their companies and preferred providers for the technology. The survey group came from companies of all sizes and across various sectors. The biggest portion, 24%, had 100-500 employees. Financial services, with 16% of respondents, was the largest sector in the survey, followed by telecommunications (14%) and health care (12%).