Gartner 2025 Software Buying Trends
Charlie Cowan
April 11, 2025
The latest edition of Gartner's Software Buying Trends Report just landed, and it provides fantastic insights for CIOs keen to understand how their process stacks up with their peers.
The survey was conducted in August 2024 across 3,500 buyers from across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, India, Germany and Brazil.
In this article I'll summarise the key findings:
- Priorities for buyers
- Number of vendors in the initial and shortlist
- Where buyers go to research
- What influences the final purchase
- What causes buyer regret after a purchase
Priorities for buyers
Respondents were asked, "thinking about your organisation's budget for the next year, which of the following software tools are top priorities for investments?"
IT security comes out top, ahead of Artificial Intelligence.
IT teams are under significant pressure as the proliferation of new products and tools, many of them AI related, present new attack vectors into company systems and data.
Within the AI ecosystem we have an ever evolving list of LLM providers and models, new agent frameworks, and the rapid adoption of MCPs (Model Context Protocol) which allow LLMs to interact with other company systems.
As many of these tools are being rolled out directly by business teams CIOs are focused on understanding the new risks and trying to mitigate them with cybersecurity platforms.
Within this it is worth noting that the number of buyers that consider assessing GenAI value and risk as a top priority has rocketed by 70% year on year.
For CIOs this is a new and every evolving category, with new risks to consider that don't fit their standard security assessment frameworks.
How buyers build their vendor lists
The report gives valuable insight into how your peers manage their vendor lists through their buying process.
Initial list
Before a buying team even starts their research they have an 'initial list'.
Imagine you were thinking of buying a car - you probably have a list of the brands you'll be considering before you go anywhere near a website or showroom.
The Gartner report shows this list has 4.4 vendors on it, and is heavily influenced by brand, previous experience, and peer recommendations.
With the average G2 software category having over 70 vendors in it - buyers don't have time to filter, so they rely on previous existing knowledge or looking at what others they respect are doing.
Shortlist
Having done some initial research into the 4.4, buyers turn it into a shortlist - and these rarely look the same.
83% of buyers say they make changes to their initial list, with 27% saying they make significant or complete changes.
This may well be due to a change in understanding of the problem or the possible solutions to that problem.
However, you should note that even through the list changes, 81% of buyers end up making a purchase from a vendor that was on their initial list!
On average, one vendor is dropped from the initial list to the shortlist.
When moving from the initial list to the shortlist buyers use a wide range of sources to guide them, with the three most important being:
- Customer reviews
- Recommendations from industry experts
- Google/search
It is interesting to see in the context of Kowalah, that ChatGPT/AI was listed as an information source by 27% of respondents.
How buyers make their decision
Having built a shortlist of 3.5 you'd think that buyers go and meet with all of those vendors.
And you'd be wrong.
Software buyers actively engage with (talk to, attend demos, conduct trials) with 2.5 vendors on average.
This ties in with the 6Sense Buyer Experience Report from 2024 that showed 80% of the time buyers make first contact with vendors, and 80% of the time the first vendor they make contact with is the one they buy from.
The report shows a significant reduction from last year's report (engaging with 3.2 vendors) to this year's report (engaging with 2.5 vendors), highlighting that buyers are getting more of their buying process and decision making done before they start speaking to vendors.
So what is it that influences the decision between these 2.5 vendors?
Product trials come top of the list - and the company that gets trialled first (often the only trial) is likely to be the selected vendor.
Avoiding purchase regret
The final part of the report provides useful insight to how to run the earlier stages of your buying process.
59% of buyers regret at least one software purchase in the past 18 months, with Security, IT and software development being at the top of the list.
Them top two reasons for purchase regret are:
- Increased costs
- Security vulnerability
So consider how you might mitigate these during your buying process.
For consumption/usage based services (like an LLM API) how will the vendor help you monitor and optimise costs?
For AI platforms, how will the vendor ensure your security and data protection as they are integrated into other tools?
I encourage you to download the report. It has been written for vendor sales teams to help them understand your buying process, yet it provides valuable insight for you as a buyer into how your process compares with your peers.
Kowalah helps CIOs accelerate AI adoption
The Gartner report supports our experience at Kowalah.
Kowalah has been developed to help CIOs and your wider team to navigate this complex and new world of selecting and buying AI software and platforms.
Interact with Kowalah to identify business problems, explore solutions, define requirements and run an effective vendor selection process.
You are not alone - use Kowalah as a coach and guide.
