Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
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Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development
IBM Survey Finds AI Strategy Now Hinges on Integration and Differentiation
The thriving enterprise of 2030 will be artificial intelligence-first, not just AI-enabled, according to IBM’s latest Institute for Business Value survey.
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The company surveyed more than 2,000 C-suite executives in the second half of 2025. The results paint a picture of the future of digital transformation dominated by AI technology.
While most executives are bullish about the potential economic upside of AI, with 79% saying they expect AI to be a significant revenue driver by 2030, only 24% say they believe they know how they’ll achieve that goal. And to move toward a revenue-enhancing model, many business leaders are willing to make tradeoffs. Speed will matter more than perfect execution, according to 55% of the respondents.
AI investments will be significant over the next four years. AI investments are expected to surge approximately 150% as a share of revenue, and executives think that AI will boost both productivity and innovation. About half of the respondents said most of their AI spending is currently focused on efficiency, but 62% anticipate that AI will drive innovations across product, services and business operations by 2030.
67% of the executives expect AI to eliminate the resource and skills bottlenecks that hinder them today, while 64% say they’ll gain a competitive advantage from innovation rather than optimization. Modular software will dominate the “smarter enterprise,” and systems will be dynamic, continuously updating, sensing and capable of changing direction in real time.
“AI’s future isn’t about bigger models. It’s about smarter integration with people and processes,” said Jinesh Dalal, head and vice president of technology development at C-Metric.
While innovation and productivity will be top priorities, ecosystems, cybersecurity and forecast accuracy will move lower down the CIO’s priority list by 2030, IBM found. But those priority changes indicate that enterprises expect to have those systems well-handled by 2030 as they invest in resources.
AI investment in cybersecurity is expected to increase 50% over the next three years, and nearly two-thirds of executives expect every employee in their IT organization to be using AI agents for security within two years.
One of the report’s most vital insights for CIOs is that to win in the age of AI, senior leaders need to think outside the box. Competitive advantage will come from deploying AI in ways that no one else has, rather than slotting in a plug-and-play AI tool. That means leaning into different toolsets. By 2030, 72% of executives expect small language models to become more prominent than large language models, and 82% expect their AI capabilities to be multimodal.
Organizations that mix custom and foundational models expect higher operating profit margin improvements (55%) than those who rely on large, pre-trained models alone. Differentiation, therefore, won’t come from using the same system everyone else does. It will come from proprietary systems tailored to specific business operations.
“By 2030, insight will be everywhere,” said Chad Gates, managing director at Pronto Software. “Interfaces will be radically different, and AI will act as the business intelligence system, decision engine and a participant in operations.”
Amid the AI boom, researchers are also making advancements in quantum computing. Enterprises that will be able to harness quantum computing power could gain a different competitive advantage, but adoption will be slower. While 59% of executives believe quantum-enabled AI will transform their industry by 2030, only 27% expect to be using it by then.
CIOs also must prepare their post-quantum cybersecurity strategies. Threat actors are currently practicing “harvest now, decrypt later” tactics, stealing encrypted data today to unlock it once quantum technology matures.
Executives also expect the workforce to undergo seismic shifts as 57% of executives expect most current employee skills to become obsolete in the next five years. When it comes to hiring, 67% say mindset will matter more than technical skills, and AI agents will be embedded across functions such as R&D, IT and marketing. With that, 67% think that their organization will have a chief AI officer in 2030.
“We’ll need more problem solvers who understand both the business and the models – people who can marry technical capability with business insight,” said Umang Dharmik, senior vice president and head of IT at Mercedes-Benz Research Development India. “That’s the future of every company, including ours.”