What sorts of strategic changes are you making to your IT budget for 2026? Are you reallocating funding from areas like infrastructure or talent in response to evolving priorities related to AI?

For 2026, we as IT of Endress+Hauser are making deliberate adjustments to our IT budget to navigate the tension between cost efficiency and strategic investment:

Strategic FTE planning: While we are not increasing overall FTEs, we aim to deliver more with the existing workforce by investing in planning and enablement to ensure the right capabilities are in place for future needs.

Selective investment: We are adopting a focused allocation approach by reducing spend where returns are limited while channeling resources into initiatives that deliver the greatest business impact.

System adoption and productivity: Driving adoption of existing platforms remains a priority to unlock their full value and enhance productivity across the organization.

AI & digital enablement: We continue to invest in AI-driven capabilities to improve efficiency and support smarter decision-making.

Our strategy reflects a careful balance: maintaining financial discipline while investing in areas that foster innovation, resilience, and measurable outcomes.

We’ve allocated a portion of the budget toward AI licenses and initiatives; however, compared to the broader non-personnel and non-AI budget (e.g., application licenses, platforms, and related projects), the AI allocation remains relatively small. Most of the AI budget currently focuses on end-user productivity licenses, with a growing number of requests for custom Agents, a demand that appears to be expanding.

Hi, Short Answer no, AI is not mature enough to have ready solution that can be deployed quickly with ROI though take your time to run enough POC process and ensure you have clear structured use case before allocating any budget, make sure this use case have sponsor from business as well