Andreessen Horowitz has published new insights on how CIOs are buying Gen AI in 2025. These new insights update last year’s findings, which were published in the article, “16 Changes to the Way Enterprises Are Building and Buying Generative AI.” For the updated insights, conversations were held with over two dozen enterprise buyers and 100 CIOs were surveyed. Out of the 16 updated insights that are foremost to enterprise buyers, here IMHO are the most notable.
AI Budgets Are Rapidly Growing – “Enterprise leaders expect an average of ~75% growth over the next year. As one CIO noted, “what I spent in 2023 I now spend in a week.”…Spend growth is driven partially by enterprises discovering more relevant internal use cases and increasing employee adoption.”
AI Is No Longer Considered Experimental – “Enterprises are increasingly paying for AI models and apps via centralized IT and business unit budgets, reflecting the growing sentiment that gen AI is no longer experimental but essential to business operations.”
Multiple Models Are the Norm – “While one reason for this is certainly to avoid vendor lock-in, model differentiation by use case has become increasingly pronounced…In this year’s survey, 37% of respondents are now using 5 or more models as opposed to 29% last year.”
Clear Leadership In the Landscape Is Emerging – “OpenAI maintained overall market share leadership, while Google and Anthropic made considerable strides over the last year…Google’s rise has been more pronounced within large enterprises…Anthropic has seen the highest adoption in the most tech-forward companies, specifically software companies and startups.”
AI Buying Process Now Incorporates Same Rigor As Buying Traditional Enterprise Software – “Companies now approach model selection with disciplined evaluation frameworks, and factors such as security—which was heavily emphasized in our interviews—and cost have gained ground on overall accuracy and reliability.”
Enterprises Are Shifting From Build To Buy – “In a space as dynamic as AI, companies are finding that internally developed tools are difficult to maintain and frequently don’t give them a business advantage—which further cements their interest in buying instead of building apps.”
Image by Brian Penny from Pixabay
