Why Tech Debt Is Eating Your ROI (And How To Fix It)
Techstrong.IT, Wednesday, August 13th, 2025
Here's a head-scratcher: Over a third (32%) of employees hide their AI usage from employers. The reasons vary from fears over job security to maintaining a personal productivity advantage. Many don't want colleagues questioning their capabilities.
I get it. When more than half of the workers we surveyed believe that being more efficient only leads to more work rather than better work, who can blame them for keeping productivity gains to themselves?
But this creates another, bigger problem. Without visibility into how people actually work, companies invest in the wrong tools, create ineffective policies and miss the opportunity to capture successful patterns that could benefit everyone. This is a costly problem. In this year alone, Forrester estimates that companies will spend north of $4.9 trillion on technology, including software, IT services, cloud and GenAI tools, a 5.6% increase over last year. However, tech debt costs $2.41 trillion a year in the U.S. alone, and a recent report indicates it would take $1.52 trillion to fix. Forget the ROI.