Software spend is up, and half of it is quietly being cut

What we're tracking

• •Spending is up, and so is the cull The headline number is easy to misread. Total business software spend is growing at its fastest pace in a decade, and a plain reading of that would suggest companies are buying more of everything. The reality reported today is stranger. Spend is rising and a large share of software is losing ground at the same time [1]. Both facts are true at once, which is the point worth sitting with.
• •The pull of what is already there Today's roundup of alternatives to a well-known automation product opens not with a feature comparison but with an anecdote about the author's father, who still uses Internet Explorer — not because he has judged it the best, but because it was already there when he bought his first computer [2]. It is a small story that carries the whole weight of the spending numbers above.
• •Organising a team around AI, not just buying it The third item is a set of takeaways from a session at an industry event on building what its speaker called an AI-native marketing team. The speaker's background is worth noting, because it is the kind of experience that lends the advice weight: she has run marketing at a company later acquired by Adobe for billions, and led marketing for Adobe's enterprise division [3]. This is not a first-time experiment being reported as one.
• •What ties the three together Record spending, the pull of defaults, and the shape of the team are not three separate stories. They are one. Money is flowing to software faster than ever, and yet a business gets no return on a tool it uses out of habit, or one it bought without changing how it works. The spend is easy. The discipline — knowing what to cut, what to keep, and how to arrange the work around it — is the part that decides whether any of it pays off.