Enterprise technology buyers are half way through 2025 and still lack the visibility to make strategic investments with longer time horizons. That said, enterprises are chasing technologies--notably artificial intelligence--to transform, become nimble and optimize so there's a cost cushion due to productivity.

In addition, buyers are also navigating a lot of hype (mostly agentic AI) and trying to comb through technology advances that change almost weekly.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet recently summed up what enterprise buyers are facing. "We continue to see a significantly elevated level of uncertainty in the global economic and geopolitical environment as compared to calendar year 2024," said Sweet. "In every boardroom and every industry, our clients are not facing a single challenge. They are facing everything at once, economic volatility, geopolitical complexity, major shifts in customer behavior."

Those comments have been echoed on earnings calls repeatedly across industries as companies reported first quarter earnings in April and beyond. AMD CFO Jean Hu said June 3 that "the macro uncertainties are a lot." "We cannot predict what's going to happen," said Hu. "We are trying to really be mindful of the macro environment and make sure we are conservative about the second half."

Coca Cola CFO John Murphy said something similar before noting that a strong balance sheet helps. CarMax, FedEx, Lennar and Truist all noted the uncertainty about the economy due to multiple factors. These comments were all made in the last two weeks.

Simply put, enterprise technology buyers are operating through 2025 in a world where long-term thinking is challenging when every other day there's a dramatic shift. It could be tariffs today, recession tomorrow and war next month. Take your pick or mix and match your set of challenges.

With that backdrop, let's look at the enterprise buyer lessons from the first half of 2025.

Agentic AI. Vendors are agent-washing, but buyers are wary. We heard this repeatedly from CxOs: AI agents are going to be a thing, but right now there's a lot (standards, security, multi-system orchestrate, data and process) preventing me from moving beyond proof of concept.

Now these blockers to agentic AI are being resolved quickly, but skepticism abounds. Agents within applications and silos (CRM, HR, ERP) can work, but the dream for agentic AI is to cut across multiple systems, processes and potentially ditch UI.

Our BT150 CxOs were definitely skeptical.

The rise of practical AI. Amid the AI hype, leaders are looking for practical returns and worrying about vendor control and sprawl. Governance of AI is also a key theme. Practical AI means that CxO aren't getting caught up in the bleeding edge technologies when older tools may drive better returns.

AI driven transformation is about industries. While AI is typically considered to be a broad and horizontal technology, the real transformational use cases are in industries. Perhaps this isn't so surprising when you consider that financial services companies are basically all about technology.

For instance, JPMorgan Chase's organization is almost a master class in driving data and AI use cases. But there are plenty of giants (Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup) leveraging AI and digital transformation.

Retail and consumer good companies are all about the optimization. Across every industry, AI is picking up steam and driving results. A sampling of industry-focused AI use cases.

Exponential efficiency equates to resilience. The one big theme in the first half of 2025 was efficiency. Drive efficiency and productivity and bank the savings for a rainy day, which is probably coming 15 minutes after you read this. When you're in another-day-another-crisis mode, resilience is everything.

Supply chain optimization. The close cousin to efficiency is supply chain automation and optimization, which is being used by the giants (Walmart, Amazon, P&G to name a few) to move fast at scale.

The supply chain has had to optimize and retool for the last 5 years due to pandemics, tariffs, and various disruptions. Enterprises are becoming very savvy in AI, robotics, automation and optimization in the supply chain.

Customer and employee experiences are being rewritten due to data and AI. At the Constellation Research Ambient Experience Summit 2025, there were a bevy of takeaways on how AI is changing the game in CX and EX. The Constellation Research AI Forum also featured a bevy of use cases.

Given that much of the agentic AI action is being driven by Salesforce and ServiceNow duking it out for CRM, it's not surprising that CX is a key theme.