Today’s volatility is turning into tomorrow’s mediocrity, at least when it comes to budget expectations for next year. Tariffs, trade wars, cyberthreats, divided customers, and economic concerns have business and tech leaders feeling markedly less bullish than they did last year at this time, our recent global survey of more than 2,600 leaders suggests. But if the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that things can (and will) change on a moment’s notice. So while conservative expectations are a fair starting point, it would be a mistake to place too much stock in them.
Forrester’s just-released 2026 Budget Planning Guides provide data-driven, actionable advice for navigating the tumult of this year’s planning season. The guides include insights and recommendations to help technology, marketing, customer experience, digital, and sales leaders know where to invest, pull back spending, and experiment to fuel growth. (Clients can access our Budget Planning Guides for technology, marketing, customer experience, digital, and sales leaders here; nonclients can read select guides here.) While the recommendations in each guide are role-specific, the overarching focus this year is helping leaders stay nimble and adaptable.
The key actions we recommend prioritizing in 2026 include the following:
Double down on data literacy and employee AI readiness programs. Anecdotal but strong evidence shows that less than 20% of all enterprises use analytical tools hands-on. That needs to change, as training employees for AI readiness is essential for long-term success. Organizations must ensure that their workforce understands how to leverage data and AI tools effectively and ethically.
Focus on customer insights and data management. Leaders with a clearer grasp of their customers in uncertain times will have a distinct advantage over leaders who lack this. To get a fuller, timelier picture of your customer, invest in customer data management technologies and augment customer feedback management tools with insights from consumer intelligence platforms and first-party digital behavioral data. Develop a rigorous data collection strategy based on what data you need, who owns that data, and what systems it needs to integrate with.
Revisit your cloud-first strategy. New sovereignty and resilience regulations, the growing number of production-ready generative AI (genAI) use cases, and other factors have switched the public cloud conversation from cloud-first to cloud-as-necessary. Consider repatriation or staying on-prem for workloads with consistent usage profiles and localized genAI to reduce spending for data that falls under sovereign or industry-specific regulations or for high-compute scenarios such as genAI to minimize latency.
Try agentic AI for task automation first within a single app, then across business apps. Explore the disruptive potential of agentic AI by experimenting with autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks and make decisions (eventually) independently. Start by experimenting with AI agents that only automate tasks within one platform, then slowly add more platforms and capabilities. Pay close attention to the communication protocols used for multiplatform agent orchestration, as these standards are still evolving.
Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guides explore these recommendations in greater depth and provide many additional function-specific insights to inform your planning and budgeting. You can also join our analysts for Budget Planning Guide webinars that we’ll be hosting in the coming weeks. Though the year ahead will bring more volatility, our guides can help you plan with confidence.
