Forrester Research’s Predictions 2027: Technology & Security report argues that next year’s central challenge for CIOs and CISOs will be gaining more control over technology without slowing progress. AI is eating a bigger share of budgets, infrastructure choices are getting harder, and security and sovereignty demands are rising. The report warns that more control brings its own risks: tough trade-offs new points of failure and possible damage to trust. Its message is that 2027 will reward deliberate choices and resilience.
AI takes a fifth of the wallet
Forrester’s global tech market forecast puts worldwide tech spending at $6.1 trillion in 2027, up 7.6% from 2026. But the mix is shifting fast toward AI, and nearly three-quarters of AI spending will go to servers and equipment. That shift puts pressure on other priorities: tech consulting and systems integration will shrink from 15% to 7% of tech spending growth by 2030.
Budgets are not keeping pace. Most leaders expect increases next year, but only 53% expect one above the IMF’s projected 3.2% inflation, so just under half will effectively lose purchasing power. Third-party services will feel the most pressure because AI automation is driving down consulting and managed services costs. Forrester advises renegotiating services and seat-based software renewals six months early and redirecting the savings toward token costs and context management, reinforcing the need for tighter control.
The quantum wildcard
Forrester says most people still believe quantum computing is years away, and that remains the likely outcome. Yet it flags a small chance of an unexpected breakthrough, likening it to the way ChatGPT caught CIOs off guard. Its research suggests the foundations for fault-tolerant quantum computing were established sooner than expected, and 87% of director-level and above decision-makers say their organizations allocate no resources to it. A surprise breakthrough would prompt boards to demand plans for “Q-Day” and leave CIOs questioning whether they are ready.
Beyond NVIDIA
NVIDIA will stay the default for frontier model training and large-scale inference, but Forrester predicts a quarter of AI infrastructure RFPs will require non-NVIDIA accelerator options. Enterprises want a second source to cut costs and reduce exposure to chip shortages, sovereignty issues and geopolitical risk. Rather than replacing NVIDIA, organizations will split workloads across chip types based on model size, latency, data sensitivity and location. Hyperscalers are pushing this shift with their own silicon, such as AWS’s Trainium, Google’s Ironwood TPU and Microsoft’s Maia 200. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud’s Zhenwu and Huawei’s Ascend serve sovereign and domestic deployments.
Sovereignty becomes a buying criterion
The report predicts digital sovereignty will drive a 20% increase in enterprise software localization. Once compliance footnote, it is now a purchasing factor. In Forrester’s surveys, 43% of enterprise applications respondents cited data privacy, residency, and sovereignty risks when adopting SaaS, and 59% of public cloud decision-makers said sovereignty constraints completely determine their choice of cloud vendor. With data localization laws, sovereign cloud mandates and diverging AI regulations spreading, Forrester urges investment in regional data stores, country-specific AI models, localized business processes and jurisdiction-specific compliance controls. This should resonate with Indian enterprises already adapting to data protection rules.
When AI-written code breaks the internet
The most striking security prediction is that an AI-generated bug or regression will cause a global outage across multiple industries. Major vendors now ship hundreds of patches at once, and sometimes over a thousand. As AI speeds up vulnerability discovery, a “find fast and fix things” mindset will take hold, and security leaders will lean on AI to remediate code and update dependencies. But review and testing capacity will not keep up, Forrester warns, and the result could be an outage on a scale comparable to the July 2024 incident. Its advice is to strengthen the ability to quickly roll back unreliable vendor patches.
The takeaway
Taken together, the predictions show leaders squeezed between ambition and constraint, with AI promising productivity gains. At the same time, budgets tighten, dependence on hardware deepens, and the stakes of every security decision rise. The report’s practical guidance is to renegotiate contracts early, diversify infrastructure, localize with care and prepare to reverse changes fast. In 2027, Forrester suggests, resilience and preparation will matter more than speed.
