Introduction: The Alarm Bell from Deloitte’s CTO
In a candid reflection on corporate priorities, Deloitte’s Chief Technology Officer highlighted a startling allocation: companies are spending roughly 93% of their budgets on technology and only 7% on people. This 93-7 split is more than a budget quirk; it signals an underlying misalignment between technological investments and the human systems that enable them to work. As automation, AI, and cloud services accelerate, the emphasis on gadgets, platforms, and models often overshadows the equally critical need to cultivate talent, culture, and workflow—the very elements that determine whether tech results translate into business value.
The Real Recipe: Culture, Workflow, and People
Briggs, the voice behind the 93-7 observation, argues that organizations obsess over the “ingredients” of modern tech—advanced models, silicon chips, software stacks—while neglecting the “recipe” that makes those ingredients productive. Culture, cross-functional collaboration, decision rights, and clear workflows shape how efficiently teams can design, deploy, and govern technology. Without strong people-led processes, even the most powerful platforms can fail to deliver outcomes, becoming expensive, underutilized tools rather than strategic accelerators.
Why This Gap Matters for Leaders
Technology alone does not create value. The real leverage comes from people who can interpret data, build trustworthy models, manage risk, and translate technical possibilities into strategic decisions. If an organization spends 93% of its tech budget while under-investing in learning, change management, and leadership development, it risks:
- Slow adoption of new systems due to insufficient change management
- Gaps in governance, ethics, and risk oversight as AI and automation scale
- Talent shortages in critical roles such as data scientists, AI ethics professionals, and platform engineers
- Culture friction that dampens collaboration across business units
Aligning Tech and People: Practical Steps
To bridge the 93-7 gap, organizations can adopt concrete actions that align technology with people and processes:
- Embed talent strategy in technology roadmaps: allocate budget for training, upskilling, and diverse teams that can challenge assumptions and improve outcomes.
- Strengthen change management: pair every major tech initiative with a deliberate change program that includes coaching, stakeholder engagement, and measurable adoption metrics.
- Establish clear governance and ethics: develop guidelines for responsible AI, model risk, and data stewardship to build trust and compliance.
- Foster cross-functional squads: empower multidisciplinary teams to own end-to-end delivery from discovery to production and support.
- Invest in leadership and culture: cultivate leaders who can navigate ambiguity, drive collaboration, and translate tech potential into business value.
What This Means for Businesses Today
For firms facing rapid digital transformation, the takeaway is simple: compute and code must work in tandem with people. The 93-7 split should motivate leadership to rebalance investments, not as a symmetric budget tweak but as a strategic realignment. By elevating talent development, process design, and governance alongside tech choices, organizations create resilient, adaptable infrastructures capable of evolving with the market and the organization’s goals.
Conclusion: A Call to Rebalance and Reimagine
The Deloitte CTO’s warning isn’t about reducing tech expenditures; it’s a call to reframe priorities. Technology is powerful, but its true potential is unlocked when people, culture, and workflow are treated as equally essential ingredients. When budgets reflect this balance, companies can accelerate innovation, reduce risk, and sustain competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving landscape.
