A new report from Amazon has revealed that global business leaders are looking to prioritise genAI investments over security tools in their 2025 IT budgets, with very few planning to devote resources to physical hardware or storage.

Releasing its Gen AI Adoption Index, Amazon Web Services (AWS) found that 45% of senior IT decision-makers across nine countries, including the UK, chose genAI as their top budget priority, far ahead of planned IT spending in areas like security tools (30%), compute power (13%), storage (7%) and physical hardware (4%).

The study, which polled more than 3,700 global IT professionals, including from the UK, US, France, Germany, India, and Japan, shows that businesses are still leaning heavily into the promise of AI to drive organisational-wide transformation.

Firms are overhauling their leadership structures to meet the moment, with emerging tech demands creating new career opportunities for AI-skilled talent at the highest levels.

AWS found that while chief technology officers and chief innovation officers still lead most digital transformation initiatives, the majority (60%) of organisations globally have hired a dedicated AI executive, such as a chief AI officer, to accelerate adoption and manage the technology’s implementation.

As AI develops further, that number is expected to accelerate, with AWS’s report predicting 86% of firms will have appointed a C-suite level AI exec by the end of next year, posts which may prove to be crucial with 90% of organisations now actively deploying AI tools.

Bringing an AI officer on board is just one facet of senior leaders’ plans, with AWS finding that the majority are rethinking their genAI talent strategies across the workforce.

According to the study, organisations are planning significant hiring initiatives, with 92% preparing to recruit for roles requiring genAI skills in 2025, while 75% will have genAI training programmes by the end of the year, a rapid increase from the 56% which already have AI upskilling measures in place.

Despite that, AWS said that 56% of business leaders have only a limited understanding of employees’ generative AI training needs, while around half (47%) are not sure how to implement genAI training programmes or have limited budgets to commence them (41%), all of which is hindering the creation of robust AI strategies.

Organisations will need to bridge these AI talent gaps, with 44% having moved past the proof of concept stage for genAI adoption, and a quarter (23%) already integrating the tech into their workflows.

However, the AWS poll found that despite increased efforts to quickly roll out more AI initiatives, firms are facing roadblocks, with just 44%, or twenty AI experiments on average, expected to reach end users by 2025.

That’s down to issues like a lack of skills among the workforce (55%), the high cost of AI development (48%), the presence of bias and hallucinations in AI models (40%), and a scarcity of compelling use cases for building AI tools (19%).

Recommended reading

• 40% of Tech Pros Expect to Make at Least 3 Career Changes
• Decline in UK Tech Job Adverts Threatens Young Talent Pipeline
• What Will Be Scotland’s Best Paid Tech Jobs in 2025

In fact, business leaders were least likely to build in-house AI solutions (25%), preferring off-the-shelf models (40%). Most (58%) said they would add custom applications on top – what the AWS report calls a simple ‘wrapper’ or addition of a user interface, without any retraining of the underlying AI model.

Firms working in financial services (44%) and ICT (43%) were among the most likely to use these out-of-the-box AI systems, despite their reliance on proprietary data and tailored solutions, a move AWS said reflects the faster deployment, cost efficiency, and advanced capabilities that such applications can now offer. 

“Generative AI represents a major inflection point for organisations worldwide. Those that successfully adopt and integrate the technology stand to gain significant benefits – from accelerating product ideation and go-to-market strategies to optimising internal operations,” concludes the report.

“Recognising this potential, companies are increasingly directing their budgets toward generative AI adoption while also strengthening their AI leadership by appointing CAIOs and implementing change management strategies.”