Collaboration technology budgets are going up. According to new research from FORTÉ, 85% of leaders expect their investment in meeting-room and collaboration-space technology to increase over the next one to three years. Smaller organizations are leading that charge, with 41% anticipating significant increases compared to 34% at larger companies.
But the more interesting story isn't the budget growth. It's what leaders expect their collaboration technology investments to accomplish.
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When we asked more than 500 IT leaders to rank the outcomes that justify new investments in collaboration technology, their rankings were consistent regardless of company size.
Improved productivity ranked first, followed by enhanced employee experience and cost savings. Equitable participation in meetings—specifically closing the gap between in-room and remote attendees—ranked fourth overall and was a priority at larger organizations. Reducing IT workload rounded out the top five.
This list signals that leaders are trying to solve for outcomes their organizations can measure, rather than focusing solely on technology specs.
As AI-assisted features like transcription, real-time translation, and intelligent cameras have become more standard, leaders are getting more selective about where they invest next.
Rather than adding more in-meeting features, leaders are interested in capabilities such as automated room health checks that operate in the background to improve reliability and reduce the need for manual IT intervention.
That selectivity makes sense given what leaders say is causing friction.
Nearly half of all respondents identified technology not working properly as the top barrier to productive meetings. That stat lands differently when you consider it’s coming from organizations already invested in collaboration technology—not those just getting started.
As Jason Moulden, FORTÉ's Vice President of Intelligent Workplace, put it in The State of Modern Collaboration Spaces research report:
“IT leaders are no longer asking what AI can add to a meeting. They're asking what it can quietly take away. We see growing interest in AI that operates behind the scenes to monitor room readiness, help prevent failures, and reduce the need for IT intervention.”
The opportunity in environment-aware capabilities lies precisely in their ability to address this gap. When technology manages the environment rather than waiting for someone to engage with it, the reliability problems that eat into meeting time before anyone says a word have a real chance of being solved.
Keith Yandell, FORTÉ's EVP of Innovation, framed the stakes clearly in the same report: “What we see is fewer experimental bets and a stronger focus on technologies that operate consistently at scale, reduce operational drag, and stand up to real-world use.”
The organizations getting the most out of their collaboration technology investments aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that:
If you're working through what that looks like for your organization, we'd genuinely like to be part of that conversation. Connect with us any time at ourforte.com or contact one of our 42 U.S. office locations.