Are You Spending to Maintain the Past, or to Build the Future?

U.S. companies are expected to spend $2.7 trillion on technology in 2025, according to Forrester; yet, despite the significant investment, measurable gains in productivity remain elusive. The culprit? They're funding the past, not building the future. Continually, in our engagements, we are seeing a pattern of paralysis. A curiosity about AI, but an apprehension to depart from the past. Don’t get me wrong, I get it. It can be tricky to grab a tiger by the tail.

However, what we find is that companies that spend heavily on keeping legacy systems operational, patching together outdated tools, or paying to support decades-old infrastructure that was never designed to integrate with AI, automate processes, or support real-time analytics are limiting their ability to effectively adopt intelligent tools.

Of course, not everything can be cutting-edge. Nor do I think it always needs to be. Budgets are finite. Risk must be managed. However, there's a clear difference between strategic stability and institutional inertia. To break free from this inertia, companies must focus on updating their technology infrastructure and integrating AI appropriately throughout the business. This approach enables quicker adaptation and shrinks the time it takes to adopt and incorporate new capabilities in the coming weeks, months, and years. The longer companies delay modernizing their systems, the harder and more expensive it becomes to adapt. At some point, maintaining outdated infrastructure becomes more costly than replacing it, not just in terms of dollars, but also in lost opportunities.

Let’s review a quick example of what this looks like in practice. Consider a recent engagement with a mid-size, regional manufacturer. They were investing $2.3 million annually, maintaining multiple inventory and business systems from the late 1990s, which were incompatible and unable to communicate with each other, let alone efficiently process the thousands of supplier documents, work orders, and compliance reports they handled monthly. After our strategy engagement, they decided to pivot and reallocate a significant portion of that investment toward a unified, AI-optimized platform with intelligent document processing and automated workflows. The result: eliminating the vast majority of manual data entry while ensuring real-time visibility across all operations. Same budget allocation. Completely different future.

AI is not a layer to bolt onto legacy systems; it's a shift in how the business operates. It requires rethinking architecture, not just adding apps.

So ask yourself: Is your technology budget preserving the past, or building toward the future you actually want? Because transformation doesn't come from spending more. It comes from spending smarter.