The 2025 CIO Survey Summary Report provides insight into the priorities, challenges, and opportunities facing IT leaders in the consumer products, retail, and life sciences industries this year. Download the entire report here. 

From accelerating innovation to ensuring cybersecurity to meeting the growing demands of data and AI governance, organizations continue to face complex challenges in the IT landscape. Against this backdrop, the role of IT teams and IT leadership have only grown more integral to enterprise strategy and execution, ensuring that organizations are continually adapting their technologies and infrastructure to meet business needs.  

Now in its fourth year, our annual CIO Survey continues to capture insights to better understand the current and future priorities and challenges of upper or C-Suite level IT professionals (CIO/CISO/CTO/VP) at large companies ($350M+ revenue) in the retail, consumer products, life sciences, and wholesale distribution industries. We leverage this information to gain greater insights today and for the immediate years to come. 

2025 CIO Survey Objectives 

The four key objectives for the 2025 CIO Survey were to:  

1. Understand the overall relationship between IT and other departments within the company. 
2. Understand current IT budget distribution, technologies/platforms used, and sources for technology-specific learning and development.   
3. Identify attributes that are important in selecting outsourcing or managed services partners, a professional services provider, or a technology platform/vendor.   
4. Identify any changes in responses from previous years’ surveys (2022, 2023, and 2024) and determine priorities for the coming year. 

2025 Market Study Results

The insights gathered from this year’s survey offer valuable insight into IT department operations today, like how they’re allocating their budgets, prioritizing ERP investments, and determining outsourcing strategies. In this year’s survey, respondents shared some of their biggest concerns and challenges for the coming year, highlighting cybersecurity and data security as critical areas, as well as where they expect to invest. The survey also offered a glimpse into how IT departments handle various services (outsourcing vs. in-house) and what criteria are most important when selecting an outsourcing or managed services partner.  

New to the survey this year were several open-ended questions about the role of AI and common use cases deployed. Clarkston was interested in learning about if and how companies were allocating resources toward AI usage and how they were measuring success and/or effectiveness. Several key themes emerged from the responses, including leveraging AI for demand forecasting and inventory management, improved personalized customer experiences, pricing optimization, fraud detection, and more. 

To learn about the detailed findings of the report, please read the 2025 Clarkston Consulting CIO Survey Summary Report below.  

Download the 2025 CIO Survey

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Explore the previous report here: 2024 CIO Survey.